The UK needs a stronger domestic position in artificial intelligence because the United States and China lead the field and access to their systems cannot be guaranteed, according to George Williamson, the head of the Alan Turing Institute. National resilience, he said, should be a key focus for the institute.

Why foreign AI dependency worries the institute

Williamson argued that the UK should not rely solely on AI systems it cannot inspect or control, or that could be restricted or switched off. As AI becomes embedded in critical services, in domains like defence, national security, critical infrastructure and healthcare, that lack of control becomes uncomfortable, he said, adding that it is hard to build an economy on things that can disappear.

Recent events show the risk is not hypothetical:

• •In June, Washington temporarily blocked the release outside the US of Anthropic's latest models.
• •The US has reportedly asked leading AI labs to withhold their models from testing by the UK's AI Security Institute until they are examined by AISI's US counterpart.

Williamson said both political and commercial pressures mean the UK "may not have access [to AI] in all the circumstances", and that this is not a position a nation wants to be in. There is, he said, a set of circumstances where it would be a good idea for the UK to have technology it does not have to ask other people's permission to use. He added that recent months had made clear the UK needed "more agency on access to technology" and a stronger sovereign position in AI.

US and China pressures behind the push

Williamson framed the warning against the runaway leadership of the US and China. He cited China as a further reason for boosting domestic AI, over concerns that Chinese-made systems might not "coincide with our values". Asked about such systems, he said: "you're not going to get an answer that's particularly helpful if you're doing GCSE history" when querying recent events in China.

"This is the defining technology of our time. We want to be able to shape that technology", Williamson said, describing the UK's aim as shaping AI in a way that accords with its values.

The concern is not confined to Britain. In recent weeks, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen urged Europe to be more self-sufficient in AI, with Lagarde speaking about the threat of being "cut off" from US and Chinese technology.

What the Alan Turing Institute will do

Williamson set out how the institute intends to support national resilience in practice:

• •Securing critical systems against disruption and countering threats from AI itself, while shaping the right strategic AI capability for the UK.
• •Producing uses of AI "for the public good", working on areas from weather forecasting to farming, and helping to spot disinformation.
• •Developing "nationally owned IP" or smaller models that could be made available to startups, since ATI and the UK probably cannot match the financial resources of major AI labs.

"We can be ambitious here without trying to copy what frontier labs are doing", Williamson said.

On state-backed disinformation, which the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, addressed last month by announcing a new national centre to tackle the problem, Williamson offered this warning:

As a registered charity, he said, ATI could serve as an objective and helpful arbiter of AI concerns, including existential threat, acting as an active partner to government and the public more generally. He added that discussion of existential risk is not always well grounded in science and that he doubts assigning percentages to it is helpful without convincing evidence - a contrast with Anthropic's own prediction that AI had a greater than 10% chance of wiping out humanity by 2030.

New leadership after a demanded shift

The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's leading AI research body, is under new leadership after the government, its main source of funding, demanded a strategic shift. In 2025 the then technology secretary, Peter Kyle, wrote to the institute's chair demanding it switch its main focus to defence and security. Williamson's predecessor, Jean Innes, resigned soon afterwards.

Williamson himself previously led His Majesty's Government Communications Centre, a secretive government body that makes gadgets for UK spy agencies - an institution that counts Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker and AI pioneer after whom the institute is named, among its former staff.

Under Williamson, the national resilience focus will also allow ATI to keep environment work that the government had wanted to sideline. "For me climate is as much a national security issue as defence", he said.