The UK employs almost a quarter (24%) of all AI workers in Europe, ahead of Germany (14%) and France (12%). Its AI economy was worth £72 billion in 2024 according to UK government figures, employing over 362,000 workers, and 3,700 AI companies directly employed 60,000 people in 2024. This increased to 5,800 companies by September 2025. The Tortoise global AI Index ranks the UK fourth globally, behind the US, China and Singapore. The UK government has a national AI Strategy and a 2025 AI Action Plan. The UK is investing in supercomputing (“BritGPT”) and AI Growth Zones, and aims to boost productivity by up to £140bn yearly by 2030. There are also initiatives like the National Data Library and the AI Safety Institute.
There have been many AI projects in the UK, including a current trial of Waymo driverless cars in London (by chance, I was actually in a taxi driving behind a test car for this project in central London in September 2025). The UK is not merely a testing ground for foreign AI companies. It is the home of DeepMind (now owned by Google) and Stability AI, an image-generating AI company that produces Stable Diffusion. Other UK AI companies include Lendable (AI fintech), Wayve (self-driving cars), Darktrace (cybersecurity), Synthesia (text to video AI) and Quantexa (AI financial crime detection). The UK is also home to significant subsidiaries of overseas giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, IBM and Meta.
Amongst the UK’s AI innovators, DeepMind is of particular interest. Founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, it was acquired by Google in 2014. The company is noted for its reinforcement learning technology and its application of AI to science. The company’s AlphaZero product learned how to play chess by playing against itself millions of times, then trounced the world champion computer chess program Stockfish in a 100-game match in which AlphaZero did not lose a single game. It repeated this feat in the much more computationally challenging game of Go, in which no computer program had even beaten a professional Go player. DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated world champion Go player Lee Sedol.
DeepMind applied the lessons of these game-based problems to the thorny problem of protein folding, which is of great significance in drug development. The transformation of a protein (a chain of amino acids) into a three-dimensional structure has an astronomical number of possible conformations. Haemoglobin folds in a way that lets it carry oxygen in your blood, for example. Misfolded proteins are the cause of diseases like Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis. The process of manually mapping these folds was extremely difficult, and up until 2020 just 150,000 proteins had been mapped by scientists. DeepMind’s AlphaFold mapped the structure of all known proteins (about 200 million) in a few months. Demis Hassabis received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024 for his work.
As mentioned, there are many UK AI companies, of which DeepMind is just the most notable. 40% of the British public had used a large language model (LLM) in 2024. The Alan Turing Institute annual AI survey found in 2024 that 72% of the British public would find that laws and regulations would make them more comfortable with AI, up significantly from the same survey the year before. Public concern in the UK about AI seems to be mounting, with a September 2025 survey finding that 59% of people viewed AI as a risk to the UK’s national security, 45% as a risk to UK society, and 39% as a risk to the UK economy. This disconnect between the government’s enthusiastic embrace of AI, and the public’s increasing level of anxiety about it is a challenge that will need to be addressed by both government and industry.
The UK’s tradition of innovation continues today in AI research. The UK invented the computer (Charles Babbage, and later Alan Turing with Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer), the jet engine (Frank Whittle), the steam train (George Stephenson), the TV (John Logie Baird) and the World Wide Web (Tim Berners Lee). The UK was also responsible for the hovercraft (Christopher Cotterill), penicillin (Alexander Fleming), magnetic resonance imaging (Peter Mansfield) and the vacuum cleaner (Hubert Cecil Booth). Even the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, was born in Scotland. However, as the telephone example shows, with Bell commercialising the telephone at Bell Labs in the USA, these technologies have often been developed and commercialised elsewhere. The UK has a great tradition of innovation, but has not always been good at exploiting that innovation commercially. The UK didn’t invent AI, but certainly, companies like DeepMind are at the forefront of AI research. Will the new generation of UK AI start-ups break the pattern of invention being exploited elsewhere?
