UK to spend £100m on AI biosecurity lab amid rising threat concerns

Highlights The UK will commit £100m to establish an AI Biosecurity Lab, which the government claims will be the world’s first. OpenAI and Anthropic will provide up to £200m in AI model credits to support the initiative. A wider funding package includes £120m for the AI Security Institute and £130m for new cyber-defence initiatives. The UK government plans to establish a £100m AI Biosecurity Lab to help protect the country against emerging biological threats, as part of a wider investment in artificial intelligence and national security. The proposed institute will bring together scientific expertise and AI technology to identify risks, including those that could arise as increasingly powerful AI systems are developed. The government has described the lab as the world’s first dedicated institution of its kind, although further details about its remit and operations have yet to emerge. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said the lab would become a “major new global institution”, bringing together “world-leading scientific expertise” to protect people from emerging biological threats. The government’s wider biosecurity initiative will include another £65m for biological surveillance and medical countermeasures against priority pathogens. OpenAI and Anthropic will provide up to £200m in AI model credits to support the work, while Google DeepMind and life sciences company Basecamp Research will also contribute expertise and research support. AI security and cyber defences The funding package also includes an additional £120m for the UK’s AI Security Institute, which evaluates the risks and capabilities of advanced AI models. The investment is intended to support its testing and research, as governments and technology companies face growing pressure to establish safeguards and technical standards for AI development. A further £60m will go towards a National Cyber Shield, which will use agentic AI to strengthen cyber defences. The government is also committing £70m to a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability Centre, known as NERV, which will use AI tools to identify cyber vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure and the wider economy. The announcements come amid concerns about how quickly AI could help identify and exploit weaknesses in digital systems. The UK government recently said it was among organisations that took some sites offline as a precaution after critical vulnerabilities were discovered in PHP, a widely used programming language for web development. Researchers warned that platforms using the language could be exposed to potential attacks. There have been no reports of successful exploits of the flaw, known as php2shell, so far. The incident has renewed concerns about how AI could help surface vulnerabilities that have remained undetected for years, potentially giving attackers new opportunities to exploit them.