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From Sunak to Starmer: What’s next for AI in the UK?
The guard has changed in Britain. For the first time in 14 years, the Labour Party is back in power, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took office on July 5.
Starmer was set to introduce a long-awaited artificial intelligence bill last Wednesday as part of the King’s Speech, in which Charles III read out the new government’s agenda. But the AI bill was pulled at last minute from the address for undisclosed reasons.
We’ll take a look at Labour’s agenda for potential AI legislation — what they’re planning, when it could come, and how their focus will differ from their Tory predecessors. But first, let’s examine Rishi Sunak’s legacy and whether he accomplished his goal of being a global leader on AI.
What did Sunak accomplish?
Sunak’s crowning moment was the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park on Nov. 1-2, 2023. The summit, held at the famed World War II codebreaking facility, was a global gathering on artificial intelligence safety aimed at international cooperation to deter AI’s worst-case scenarios from occurring. The Bletchley Declaration, the resulting document, was signed by the UK, the United States, and the European Union, but also, notably, China, along with two dozen other signatories. (And Sunak got to pal around with tech CEOs such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk, and DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman — who has since joined Microsoft.)
Bletchley was an important international agreement, but it also signaled that the UK’s leadership — under Sunak, at least — would be light-touch. He didn’t call for AI legislation, preferring to deploy Bletchley as a voluntary global corporate and government agreement.
Nick Reiners, a senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group, said the hyperfocus on “existential risk” of AI is somewhat of a niche Silicon Valley obsession, a crowd that Sunak was interested in appeasing. “He saw AI as a way to build a legacy in a short time and this issue was something that animated him personally.”
What’s on deck for Labour?
Scott Bade, also a senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group, doubts Starmer will follow Sunak’s lead on AI, but said he won’t throw away the standing that Sunak won for the country either. “Starmer does not have a signature global issue yet, and is unlikely to see AI as that issue,” Bade said. “But I'd be surprised if the UK didn’t keep showing up at the table to build on what Sunak did since this is the niche Britain now has in AI global governance. It will just be dialed down a peg or two.”
Compared with Sunak’s existentialist concerns, Starmer should be more focused on the short-term harms of artificial intelligence, Reiners said, citing workers’ rights and bias as examples. And with that comes the promise of actual legislation.
The bill that Labour was set to introduce would have reined in the most powerful large language models — but actual regulation seems to have been pushed off. In his speech, King Charles read off bills about cybersecurity as well as digital information, which seem to have won out over the AI bill, at least for now. “My suspicion is that they opted not to present this [AI regulation] now as they didn’t want to upset their growth narrative,” one tech leader told the Financial Times. Reiners said that departmental limits on parliamentary bills per session could be a constraint as well, and that AI was a lower priority.
When an AI bill is introduced, expect it to still be light-touch relative to the more expansive European AI Act. “I would say the UK is still generally respected as taking a thoughtful innovation-friendly approach to regulation in general,” Reiners noted.
The UK is home to successful AI startups such as Stability AI, maker of the image model Stable Diffusion, Google’s DeepMind lab, and the digital avatar company Synthesia, which we profiled in last week’s edition. And big AI-focused US tech companies, such as Microsoft and Salesforce have recently invested in the country. With the country’s economy on the ropes, Starmer’s challenge is to introduce legislative reforms that won’t totally scare off Big Tech.
Starmer's plan to boost UK economy will take some time
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from the Adriatic Sea.
How is Europe’s policy on Ukraine going to change if Trump arrives in the White House?
Well first, it is not going to change its fundamentals. You should know that the very first thing done by the newly elected European Parliament was to take a very strong and very broadly supportive resolution with very strong support for Ukraine. So what's going to happen is that, yes, Europe will continue that particular line, that it might be necessary. I think it will be necessary to further increase the financial support, the support that Europeans is already substantially higher than the Americans. But if the Americans diminish, reduce, stop, whatever Trump is going to do, then Europe clearly would have to step up even more.
How does Prime Minister Starmer's “renewal plan” make it possible to sort of make Britain great again?
Well, it's early days. It's clearly going to be economic policy that is somewhat more sort of interventionist in different ways. I think the important thing is that he wants to have a new start relationship with Europe. I think that's going to take some time, but I think it's going to have some effect. But, I don't think we will see any dramatic steps in the next few months anyhow. So it's early days.
Microsoft’s Inflection deal gets a closer look
The UK’s antitrust regulator is scrutinizing Microsoft’s unique relationship with Inflection AI. The PC giant did what some have called an “acqui-hire” — not buying the company outright, but rather hiring many of its former leaders and employees instead.
Microsoft poached the once-$4 billion startup’s co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan as well as “most of its staff.” It paid $650 million to license Inflection’s technology, which is how investors will get their returns. Now, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is looking at whether the deal is a “de facto merger,” a decision it’s expected to make by Sept. 11.
Microsoft is already facing scrutiny for its $13 billion investment in OpenAI in the US and UK, choosing to relinquish its non-voting board seat to stave off further criticism last week. We’re watching for how Microsoft fares in court, and whether it changes its tack in competing for the top talent and tech in AI development.
UK's new PM Starmer aims for closer EU ties
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from the Adriatic Sea.
How will the new UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer reset relations at home and abroad?
Well, I think overall there's going to be a lot of continuity in terms of foreign and security policies. They've already sent the defense secretary to Kyiv to say that if anything, it's going to be even stronger support. But in terms of Europe, it’s going to be a new nuance and new attempts. The new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has already been to Germany, he's been to Poland, he’s been to Sweden, and he's talked about a European pact, foreign and security issues, cooperating more closely. And he's been invited to a meeting with all of the foreign ministers. So that's where we are likely to see, some change in the months and perhaps years ahead.
How did Macron survive the snap election in France?
Yep, that remains to be seen. There was, of course, a surprise result in the sense that the extreme right came in third after first the left, which has some extreme element, and then President Macron's coalition. But it's a hung parliament. There's no clear answer who's going to govern. So, we'll have to wait and see what's going to be the governance of France. I think the emphasis has shifted from isolating the far right to isolating the far left and see some sort of stable government can be made out of that. Very much an open question.
Graphic Truth: 2024 Euro Cup of Approval
The Euro Cup kicked off on June 14 and is now down to the final eight, with the beautiful game having seen its fair share of victories and upsets in recent weeks. At the same time, battles have been waged on the political stage, with the far right surging first in European Parliament elections and then in the first round in France this past weekend.
All this talk of soccer and politics made us wonder … how well would these countries compete if the matches were decided based on national leader approval ratings?
Soccer powerhouses England and France are favored to dominate the Euros. But their leaders, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and President Emmanuel Macron, both of whom suffer from low approval ratings (and are watching their electorates head to the polls this weekend), wouldn’t generate the same optimism on the pitch.
What happens when we swap national sides for leaders – is your favorite team still in with a chance?
A group of people thought to be migrants arrive in Dungeness, Kent, after being rescued in the Channel by the RNLI following following a small boat incident.
Hard Numbers: UK vote may scrap Rwanda plan, Orban visits Ukraine, India mulls marital rape, Bannon reports for prison, Beryl turns deadly, Fuji for a price
320 million: If, as widely expected, the Labour Party wins Thursday’s national elections in the UK and scraps the outgoing government’s controversial plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, the British government will have spent more than £320 million that can’t be recovered. Labour has pledged instead to spend state funds to build a new Border Security Command that dismantles the people-smuggling gangs that help asylum-seekers cross the English Channel in small boats.
1:Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and Europe’s most pro-Russian leader, made an unexpected visit to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This marks Orbán’s first trip to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. The visit coincides with Hungary assuming the rotating EU presidency, which happened despite concerns from other European politicians over Hungary’s frequent clashes with Brussels. Discussions are expected to focus on peace possibilities and bilateral relations between Hungary and Ukraine.
36: India’s supreme court has promised to rule later this month on whether India’s much-anticipated new penal code will make it acrime for a man to rape his wife. For now, India is one of the world’s 36 countries that have not criminalized marital rape.
4: Former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon reported to prison on Monday. He’ll now serve afour-month sentence for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Bannon, who has called himself a “political prisoner,” remains influential with pro-Trump conservatives.
5: Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 165 mph, caused widespread destruction across the southeast Caribbean on Monday, killing at least two people. Beryl is the first Atlantic hurricane of the season.
12: Early Monday, Japan’s park rangers began a crackdown on the surge of visitors hoping to walk up the iconic Mount Fuji. Climbers will now have to pay 2,000 yen (about $12) to hit the trails, and the number of hikers will be limited to 4,000 a day to limit the overcrowding and litter that have drawn more complaints in recent years.
What the France and UK elections mean for the West
Major Western democracies like France, the UK, Canada, and the US are on the verge of sweeping political change, but how will upcoming elections impact our collective ability to deal with the world’s biggest challenges? How will Western allies approach issues like climate change, the AI revolution, and cyber defense in an increasingly fractured world? Mark Carney, former Governor of the Banks of England and Canada and current UN Special Envoy on Climate Action & Finance, joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World for a hard look at three of America’s closest allies: France, Britain, and Canada.
“We're operating in a world where security is paramount. You need resilience,” Carney tells Bremmer, “You need to look to those countries where you have common values and you need to reinforce them.”
Carney and Bremmer also delve into the strategic importance of the US-Canada relationship and how our neighbor to the north can be a reliable, strategic partner in many critical areas, including national security and climate transition. He warns Canadians and Americans shouldn’t “hit the snooze button” when it comes to strengthening US-Canada ties and stresses that Canada can be a critical partner in providing lean energy, crucial minerals, and AI expertise. As for Carney’s rumored political future as a potential Liberal Party leader? Well, you’ll just have to watch the interview to find out.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
How political unrest across the West will impact the world: A conversation with UN's Mark Carney
Listen: On this episode of the GZERO World Podcast, major Western democracies like France, the UK, Canada, and the US are on the verge of sweeping political change, but how will upcoming elections impact our collective ability to deal with the world’s biggest challenges like climate, AI, and cyber defense? Mark Carney, former Governor of the Banks of England and Canada and current UN Special Envoy on Climate Action & Finance, joins Ian Bremmer to take a hard look at three of America’s closest allies: France, Britain, and Canada.
Upcoming elections in France and the UK could mean big changes for the West, similar to the aftermath of Brexit. Carney says there are still many aspects of the UK-EU relationship that need to be recalibrated. He also stresses the strategic importance of the US-Canada relationship and Canada’s role as a reliable partner in everything from national security to critical minerals to fighting climate change.
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