UK to invest £100m in 'world first' AI Biosecurity Lab

The UK is setting up a national AI Biosecurity Lab and putting £100m into it as part of Wednesday’s Budget. Ministers are calling it a “world first” institute, and they want support from leading AI firms as well.

The pitch is broad but pointed: use AI to strengthen defences against emerging biological threats. John Healey said AI will affect everything from hospitals to schools and the wider economy, while also arguing for a “distinctively British approach” that protects workers and national interests.

The government has not yet spelled out exactly what the new lab will do day to day. But AI Minister Kanishka Narayan described it as a major global institution built around world-leading scientific expertise, with a brief that includes staying ahead of cyber attacks and biological risks. He also linked it to backing British science, advanced chips and domestic AI companies.

OpenAI and Anthropic are supporting the lab with £200m worth of AI model credits, which can be used on their systems. Alongside that, the Chancellor plans an extra £120m for the UK’s AI Security Institute, which was created by the previous Conservative government in 2023 to assess the risks of the most advanced models.

The spending spree does not stop there. The Budget also includes £60m for a “National Cyber Shield” using agentic AI, plus £70m for a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability Centre, which will use AI tools to find weaknesses across critical infrastructure and the wider economy. All of this lands just after UK authorities took some sites offline as a precaution when flaws were found in PHP, a widely used programming language, with researchers warning that AI can surface old bugs very quickly.