Government aims to make UK top spot for open source AI

In his speech at the AI Summit in London, Kanishka Narayan, minister for artificial intelligence (AI) and online safety, said the UK government is aiming to make Britain the home for open source AI developers, to mirror the success of the web.

In his speech, Narayan spoke about the need for the UK to determine its own AI strategy. “We have to ask honestly, what is the story that we are being told about AI today? Too often, it is a story of AI inevitability. Britain has never accepted that view of progress. We have rejected technological determinism in favour of agency: the agency of our state, the agency of our communities, the agency of our people,” he told delegates attending the headliner stream at the summit.

Referencing the invention of the web, he said: “When Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web open, he did something profound. He removed barriers to building. He created a platform that anyone could participate in. From the World Wide Web to AlphaFold, Britain has always chosen to open new technologies, not close them down.  

“The best AI tools in the world won’t be built behind closed doors by a handful of companies – they’ll be built by people who ship code, share it and let others make it better. We want those people choosing to build here in Britain, and we want them to know that this is a country that backs them to succeed,” Narayan said.

The minister used his speech at the AI Summit to speak about the the recent Hack for Impact hackathon and Open Source AI Builder Fund, which he said is worth more than half a million pounds. “If you build something here that can go further, we will not leave you stuck at prototype,” he said.

The recently run hackathon, supported by Nvidia, brought together hundreds of open source AI developers from across the UK to build tools tackling challenges across public services and city infrastructure, using open data from the City of London.  

Through the Open-Source AI Builder Fund, Narayan said the UK government is providing £500,000 worth of compute – 160,000 GPU-hours (graphics processing unit hours) of processing power – from the UK’s AI Research Resource. The goal is to give projects the AI infrastructure they need to go from prototypes to public AI tools. 

Along with the funding for open source AI, Narayan said the government’s in-house incubator for AI will offer open source AI developers a mentoring scheme through the AI Builder Mentoring Scheme. This aims to pair hackathon winners with experts from the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), the government’s in-house AI team, to help the best ideas become working public tools.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said i.AI has brought in top AI experts from UK universities through an Open Source Fellowship Programme to develop open source AI tools that improve public services, from education to policing. According to DSIT, the AI Builder Mentoring Scheme goes further, backing Britain to become the world’s go-to destination for open source AI builders.

There is also a new Open Source AI Dev Board, which DSIT said gives 10 UK-based developers under the age of 30 a direct line into government so they can influence how AI is used and developed. Chaired by Narayan, the board will convene a series of roundtables over 2026.

Narayan said the board will put the developers “directly into the heart of government’s open source AI strategy”.  

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