Trump’s Anthropic Kill Switch is the AI Wake Up Call Britain Needs

Now we just need to actually hear it...

On Thursday, Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey resigned saying that the Government wouldn’t “commit the resources we need to defend the country.” Extraordinarily, this wasn’t the most important news for Britain’s future this week.

Overnight, the Trump administration used the export control directive to suspend access to Anthropic’s latest models (Fable and Mythos) to ‘any foreign national’ including Anthropic’s own staff. Anthropic responded by withdrawing the models completely from the market. You can read their statement here.

There will be many takes on what this means for Anthropic itself and for the US Government’s approach on AI. But I want to focus on what this means for the UK.

It is easy to see the pulling up of the drawbridge on AI as the latest in a line of ‘sputnik’ moments in AI. That actually demeans its impact significantly.

The space race didn’t leave countries like the UK missing out on the latest day-to-day technology, nor prevent our factories from operating or our country from defending itself. The lack of British accents on the moon may have been a symptom of British post-imperial decline but it didn’t impact our ability to function or sit at the global top table in the late 20th Century. Secure access to the AI frontier in the 21st Century will.

For the UK to remain relevant - and secure - will require leverage. And that leverage needs building fast. For too long, we’ve comforted ourselves with the warm glow of our soft power: Paddington, the Premier League and RP-accented Hollywood stars. But as President Trump has just reminded us yet again, we live in a hard power world now.

Britain is actually better placed than our near competitors in this world. For the past 9 years I’ve worked directly with the most innovative and audacious entrepreneurs in the country - dreaming big and pushing at the frontier. Our home-grown technology ecosystem has made massive progress. Last week for London Tech Week those strengths were on show. We had record AI investment stats, a showcase of frontier talent density unparalleled outside Silicon Valley and yet another $1bn+ AI unicorn (PhysicsX) to add to Britain’s stable - unrivalled beyond the US and China. And we have Sir Demis Hassabis. His decision to keep Deepmind here post-Google acquisition could prove as consequential for Britain as any since 1945.

What Britain does not have yet is true sovereign capacity in any of the domains that will matter. To give successive Governments credit, they have within the bounds of normalcy treated this issue seriously. Rishi Sunak’s genuine commitment to this topic has given Britain its AI Security Institute. Initially dismissed but now replicated by the US, it is not only a genuinely world-leading institution of technical talent for model evaluation, it is a signal that state capacity can be built when we aspire to.

This Government has also done things that deserve genuine recognition. They have brought into Government a succession of serious people like Matt Clifford, Jade Leung and James Wise who understand the scale of the task at hand. They’ve charted a sensible course by avoiding pulling up a faux-nationalistic drawbridge on tech that would do more harm than good. They’ve created a £500m SovereignAI fund to invest and help scale British AI success stories which last week saw one of its investee companies, CosineAI, announce plans for a first truly British Sovereign AI model with a who’s who of domestic industry behind it. And we have a newly announced £1.1bn AI Hardware plan to back a growing cluster of nascent semiconductor players like Fractile, Callosum and OLIX who are trying to leapfrog to the next phase of chip development, not trail the current one.

These are the right answers, but they’re of completely the wrong magnitude. Given a target moving at the speed of light, they are decimal places and many zeros off. And we remain constrained by high energy prices and outdated regulation that will prevent us building out the compute and companies we need to secure leverage right across the stack. Government may be taking this seriously for normal times, but if it isn’t obvious already… these are not normal times.

When resigning, John Healey said the Prime Minister knows “what defence needs”. In my experience in Whitehall, there are more people who know what Britain in the exponential world of AI needs than readers would imagine. What matters is whether the risks and hard choices can be taken that allow us to compete and thrive in this new world. Unlike many of our competitor nations also shut off today, we can do so - but not without the leverage we so desperately lack today.