UK backs two national AI labs with up to £60M, led by UCL and Oxford

The government is backing two new national AI research labs with up to £60M through UK Research and Innovation, in a bet on fundamental research rather than another applied-AI programme. One lab will be led by University College London, the other by the University of Oxford, and between them they draw in Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Imperial College London. The money comes via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and runs over six years, alongside access to large-scale computing worth tens of millions more.

The two labs have distinct briefs. SOFAIR, the Science of Fundamental AI Research lab led by Professor David Barber at UCL, will work on open-source AI that can run on widely available hardware, rather than only in the data centres of the largest firms. BOLD, the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery lab led by Professor Jakob Foerster at Oxford, will focus on systems that learn more efficiently, adapt to unfamiliar situations, and navigate the physical world.

The framing matters as much as the money. Most of the headline progress in AI over the past few years has come from a handful of well-resourced private labs training ever-larger foundation models, the big general-purpose systems that power today’s AI tools. A public programme aimed at cheaper, more efficient, more open machine learning is a deliberate counterweight: an attempt to keep fundamental research, and the talent that does it, anchored in UK universities rather than ceded entirely to industry.

It is not a huge sum by the standards of frontier AI, where single training runs can cost more than this whole programme, and the labs will initially receive around £8M each, with the rest released after an assessment in autumn 2026. But the direction is notable. This doubles the number of such labs from one to two and lifts the total from an earlier £40M plan, a modest signal that the UK wants a public stake in where the science goes next, not just in where the products are sold.