GOV.UK founder warns AI gold rush could leave Britain locked in

Britain risks swapping its dependence on foreign technology suppliers for an even deeper reliance on a handful of AI providers, according to GOV.UK founder Mike Bracken. Bracken, who founded the Government Digital Service (GDS) and served as the UK's first Government Chief Data Officer, says governments and other institutions are gradually giving up control over critical systems as they pile more technology dependencies onto their operations. "Institutions rarely lose sovereignty in a crisis. They lose it one reasonable decision at a time," Bracken said. "The biggest risk facing many organizations today is not that somebody takes control away from them. It's that they gradually give it away. Every technology decision can make it harder or easier to change direction in the future." The warning comes as governments throw money at "sovereign AI," typically involving domestic compute capacity, homegrown models, or infrastructure intended to reduce reliance on overseas providers. Bracken reckons that misses a more fundamental point. Sovereignty isn't necessarily about owning the infrastructure or technology underneath a service, he said. What matters is whether an organization can still make its own decisions when its circumstances change. That becomes particularly relevant with AI, where organizations increasingly build services around models and platforms controlled by a relatively small group of technology companies. Switching away later may be considerably harder once those systems are buried throughout an organization's infrastructure and workflows. "Too often, institutions only discover they have lost that flexibility when circumstances demand it," Bracken said. The problem isn't confined to Whitehall. Businesses, universities, charities and other institutions face much the same issue as more of their operations are handed over to outsourced platforms and AI services. Bracken lays out his argument in Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide, a new book co-authored with colleagues at consultancy Public Digital, which he co-founded after leaving government. The UK government, meanwhile, is pushing its own version of sovereign AI, pouring money into domestic computing infrastructure and expanding access to the processing power needed to build and run AI models. But Bracken argues that simply putting infrastructure within national borders doesn't necessarily give an organization meaningful control over the technology it depends on. The more important question is whether it retains the ability to change supplier, technology, or strategy without discovering that years of earlier decisions have made doing so prohibitively difficult. "This challenge extends far beyond technology," he said. "Questions about artificial intelligence, critical infrastructure, national resilience, economic competitiveness, and state capacity are increasingly linked by whether institutions retain the ability to make decisions and act on them, or become constrained by systems, suppliers, and dependencies they no longer control." "Every institution depends on technology. The question is whether that technology expands your freedom to act or quietly narrows it." For Bracken, calling AI sovereign doesn't count for much if you're still stuck with whoever supplied it. ®