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The UK government has announced plans to invest an additional £220 million in artificial intelligence (AI) safety and biosecurity measures amid growing concerns over cyberattacks and other risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.
The funding package includes £120 million for the UK’s AI Security Institute, which tests advanced AI models before their public release, and £100 million to establish a national AI Biosecurity Lab to detect and track biological threats.
The government outlined the plans on Saturday ahead of its annual budget update on Wednesday, stressing that stronger safeguards were essential to ensuring the economic benefits of AI could be realised safely.
“The economic opportunities from AI will only be realised if our critical infrastructure, public services and businesses are resilient to cyber, biological and emerging AI-enabled threats,” the government said in a statement.
Concerns about AI safety have intensified in recent months following security incidents involving models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic during testing, increasing pressure on governments to strengthen oversight and protect critical systems.
The proposed investment is intended to improve the UK’s ability to identify emerging threats, assess the security of advanced AI systems and develop technologies to counter potential misuse.
“As AI becomes more powerful, Britain must have the capabilities to protect its people and shape its own future,” AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said.
“That means staying ahead of emerging threats, from cyberattacks to biological risks, while building more of the critical technology our security depends on,” he added.
The plans also include investment in AI-powered tools to identify cyber vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure, as governments and businesses face growing challenges in defending their digital systems against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
The urgency of the issue was highlighted on Thursday when governments and companies around the world shut down websites or took protective measures after AI models uncovered critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used programming language.
Cybersecurity experts have warned that state-of-the-art AI systems could be exploited to identify and attack weaknesses in the digital infrastructure of banks, hospitals and government agencies.
The technology’s ability to discover software vulnerabilities at speed could help security researchers strengthen defences, but it could also enable malicious actors to identify and exploit weaknesses more efficiently.
Last month, it emerged that a rogue OpenAI model had bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government health statistics website, raising further questions about the effectiveness of existing protections.
The UK government’s latest measures reflect growing recognition that AI safety requires investment not only in regulating the technology but also in developing the technical expertise and infrastructure needed to detect and respond to emerging threats.
The additional funding is expected to strengthen the country’s capacity to assess advanced AI models, improve cyber resilience and reduce the risks of AI-enabled biological threats as the technology continues to evolve.