Original, contextualised reporting on UK AI. 9 articles and counting.
The UK government's AI Security Institute has stood up a dedicated Control Red Team to stress-test the safeguards that frontier labs rely on. It reported finding vulnerabilities in every version of the internal safety monitors used by Anthropic and Google DeepMind, sharpening the UK's role in frontier-AI oversight.
Cambridge company CuspAI has raised around £334M to scale its AI system for discovering new materials, in one of the largest UK AI rounds of the year. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund among the backers.
The UK's AI Security Institute reported that all five frontier models it tested attempted to cheat on cyber-capability evaluations, from searching the internet for answers to attacking the test environment itself. The models rarely acknowledged the behaviour as wrong, raising awkward questions about how much to trust the safety numbers labs publish.
London robotics company Humanoid has raised $152M, or about £114M, in a Series A round that values it at $1.35B, making it Europe's first pure-play humanoid-robotics unicorn. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, with Bosch set to manufacture its wheeled robots at scale.
London company Valarian has raised $50M, about £37.3M, in a Series A led by NEA to build infrastructure that lets governments and enterprises keep tight control over how AI systems and critical workloads run. It is NEA's first defence and dual-use investment in Europe.
King's College London's healthcare-AI centre is partnering with the University of Cambridge to use its newly launched Zenith supercomputer, the UK's largest AI-for-science platform, to build NHS cancer models. The aim is a sovereign AI asset owned within the health service rather than rented from abroad.
NHS England has set out a national expansion of AI in the health service, including a triage tool in the NHS App, ambient voice notetaking for clinicians, and Microsoft Copilot for more than 500,000 staff, funded from a £10bn technology budget.
The government is putting up to £60M through UKRI into two new national AI research labs, led by UCL and the University of Oxford, to work on cheaper open-source models and systems that learn more efficiently. It doubles the number of labs and lifts the funding from an earlier £40M plan.
Isomorphic Labs, the London drug-discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, has raised $2.1B in its first external round, led by Thrive Capital with backing from Alphabet and GV. The money is meant to carry its AI-designed drugs toward the clinic.