Artificial Intelligence: National Security Implications

Lord Tarassenko Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend highlights the importance of us being incredibly vigilant on cyber security. He highlights the important role that the cyber security Bill will play in bringing data centres, large load controllers and managed service providers into the regulatory ambit, as it were, but he is also right that we need to do more. The National Cyber Security Centre supports organisations through Cyber Essentials. It published new joint guidance with the AISI on preparing cyber defences for frontier AI. My noble friend also mentioned the importance of the Government taking cyber security seriously, which is what they have set out to do through the Government’s cyber action plan.

[Lord Tarassenko (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a conflict of interest as a senior adviser to the Alan Turing Institute, the national AI institute. We have known for a while that access to US big tech models might be restricted, and it will happen again. We should not rely on Chinese open source models either, for obvious reasons. There is an alternative: a UK sovereign AI model. The Alan Turing Institute has argued for several months that the UK has the technological capability in the institute, in academia and in its nascent AI industry. The UK also has sovereign data assets, such as data from the BBC and the Met Office. The Alan Turing Institute, as a national AI institute, could lead a team to train a sovereign model for millions of pounds, not billions of dollars, following UK values, including transparency and respect for copyright. The Council for Science and Technology’s AI subgroup and many others are convinced. What more evidence does DSIT need to fund the training of a UK sovereign AI model?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

We are very attentive to the importance of building out sovereign AI capabilities that complement the strength of the UK’s AI sector. At the model level, the sovereign AI fund has invested in Ineffable Intelligence and Cosine, and we are targeting companies innovating in hardware, providing an investment into Callison. In terms of the importance of investing in this area, that is an approach that we are able to take through the sovereign AI fund. In respect of the specific proposal that the noble Lord recommends, I am happy to pick that up with the department and come back to him specifically on that model.