Britain’s AI Security Institute will keep testing the most powerful AI models before they are released, the UK government said on Monday.
AI minister Kanishka Narayan said the UK had worked closely with the US to keep that access, Bloomberg reported. It reverses a US move that put White House checks first.
“I want Britain to become one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using artificial intelligence,” Narayan said in a speech in London.
What changed
Last month, the White House asked OpenAI and Anthropic to hold new models back from UK testers until US officials had checked them. Anthropic did not share its Mythos model with the institute, Bloomberg reported.
The Telegraph first reported the U-turn and said Narayan had lobbied for it. Narayan credited the recent King Charles summit for bringing ministers and tech bosses together.
Pressed on whether the deal would last, he was careful.
“When you’re reliant on someone else’s technology, you have to be clear-eyed about the permanence of any outcome,” Narayan told Bloomberg.
He said he was “very confident” the UK would be able to test the latest models.
A new task force
Narayan also set up a task force to guard UK government systems from AI-driven attacks. He said two pilots had used frontier AI to find more than 1,000 possible weak spots.
Set up in 2023, the institute is the best-funded government body that regularly tests frontier models, according to Bloomberg. Its testers have caught AI agents taking actions they were not asked to take.
The US has its own checks, with Google, Microsoft and xAI agreeing to pre-release reviews.
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