On 13 January 2025, the UK government published its AI Opportunities Action Plan (the Plan) and government response (the Response), setting out how ‘Britain will become an AI superpower’ and ‘shape the AI revolution’.  There's a lot of detail in both the Plan and the Response covering how the UK will lay the foundations for AI, embrace AI through adoption and scaling, and creating a UK Sovereign AI. So here we summarise the key points.

The UK's AI ambition and principles

The Plan was prepared by Matt Clifford, co-founder and Chair of investor Entrepreneur First and Chair of the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, at the request of Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The government's ambition is to:

shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that:

• AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend;
• AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government; and
• the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

Matt Clifford's approach is based on the principles of:

• be on the side of innovators - do the actions benefit people and organisations trying to do new and ambitious things in the UK?
• invest in becoming a great customer - government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets and boosting the domestic ecosystem;
• crowd in capital and talent;
• build on the UK strengths and catalytic emerging areas.

The Plan sets out 50 recommendations across three foundations. Government agreed with 48 recommendations in its Response and partially agreed with two.

Actions and recommendations

The Plan, and those recommendations, are set out in three sections - Laying Foundations; Embracing AI; Home-Grown AI.

In summary:

1. Laying foundations to enable AI
   1. building infrastructure, including setting out a long-term plan for the UK's AI infrastructure needs to be backed by a 10-year investment commitment, allocating sovereign compute, and establishing AI growth zones;
   2. unlocking data assets in the public and private sector, including identifying high-impact datasets to make available to AI researchers and innovators, strategically shape what data is collected in the future, publish guidelines for releasing open government datasets which can be used for AI, establish a copyright-cleared British media asset training data set (for which government partially agrees as DCMS and DSIT will consult separately);
   3. training, attracting and retaining the next generation of AI scientists and founders, including by assessing the skills gap, increasing the numbers of AI graduates, ensuring a lifelong skills programme is ready for AI, exploring how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from the best Universities for AI (for which the government accepts in part, noting that the Industrial Strategy will address the recommendation and referring to existing arrangements), and encouraging top talent and graduates to come to the UK;
   4. enabling safe and trusted AI development and adoption through regulation, safety and assurance, including continuing to support the AI Safety Institute, reforming UK text and data mining regime, committing to funding regulators to scale up their AI capabilities, ensure all sponsor departments include a focus on enabling safe AI innovation in their strategic guidance to regulators, encourage AI regulatory sandboxes, require all regulators to publish annually how they have enabled innovation and growth driven by AI in their sector, and support the AI assurance ecosystem;
2. Change lives by embracing AI
   1. making AI adoption core to delivering the government's mission;
   2. including adopting measure to scan, pilot and scale AI;
   3. enable public and private sectors to reinforce each other, including through better procurement, using digital government to create new opportunities for innovators, publishing useful information in an ‘AI Knowledge Hub’, and identify early ‘quick win’ opportunities;
   4. address private-sector-user-adoption barriers, including leveraging the new Industrial Strategy, and appointing AI Sector Champions;
3. Secure our future with home-grown AI
   1. by creating a UK Sovereign AI, with the power to partner with the private sector to deliver the UK's stake in frontier AI, invest into companies, deliver appropriate sites for compute in the UK, package and provide access to UK-owned data sets.

There is a lot of detail in the Plan. However, the government is doing more than what is in the Plan. For example:

• AI management essentials - ‘a resource that is designed to provide clarity to organisations around practical steps for establishing a baseline of good practice for managing artificial intelligence (AI) systems that they develop and/or use’
• Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard - a public register of where the public sector is developing and deploying AI systems.

The Response sets out the dates by which government intends to action each recommendation. Many fall around the time of the Spring 2025 Spending Review, we further announcements from government are expected then and ongoing.

If you would like to discuss how current or future regulations impact what you do with AI, please contact Tom Whittaker, Brian Wong, Lucy Pegler, Martin Cook, Liz Smith or any other member in our Technology team.