Where did DSIT go? Inside the UK’s tech reshuffle
Sifted ● Covered by 6 sources
The UK just broke up its tech ministry DSIT, scattering its jobs across three different departments. AI now reports straight to the PM's office, but nobody's said who actually regulates it.
Based on reporting by Sifted — read the original for the full story.
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So Britain has decided that the tidiest way to run tech policy is to stop having a tech department. Under new PM Andy Burnham, the three-year-old Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been carved up and handed out like leftovers, and the UK's startup and AI crowd is left squinting at an org chart trying to figure out who's actually in charge of anything now.
The biggest chunk lands at a newly muscled-up Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, run by Jonathan Reynolds. DBIST picks up science and innovation policy, the Investment Security Unit, the Sovereign AI unit, ARIA and UKRI — essentially the funding and industrial-strategy plumbing that used to sit under DSIT's roof. The logic, as ministers tell it, is that research should live closer to commercialisation rather than off in its own silo.
AI itself gets an odd dual home. Minister Kanishka Narayan will split time between DBIST and the brand-new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and — notably — will sit in cabinet meetings. That's a real elevation, putting AI on the same footing as national security or economic policy in terms of proximity to Number 10. The AI Security Institute reportedly moves into the cabinet orbit too, reinforcing the idea that Downing Street wants AI decisions made close to home rather than delegated out to a standalone department.
Meanwhile the Department for Culture, Media and Sport inherits a surprisingly large slice of the old DSIT digital brief: online safety, digital identity, cyber resilience, telecoms, and the Gov.UK service stack. Pairing digital infrastructure with media and culture wasn't the obvious call, but it does mean DCMS now owns most of what ordinary citizens actually touch when they interact with government online.
What nobody has pinned down yet is who owns data protection, the National Data Library, oversight of the ICO, or — more strikingly — AI regulation itself. The government has assigned strategy, adoption and safety responsibilities but left the regulatory question hanging. For founders and investors, the reorganisation itself is almost beside the point. What matters is whether three departments now juggling overlapping pieces of the same puzzle can actually talk to each other, because Whitehall's track record on cross-departmental coordination is not exactly legendary.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Splitting AI regulation from AI strategy and shoving them into three different buildings is the kind of move that looks decisive in a press release and chaotic in practice six months later. I've seen this pattern before with EU tech policy — elevate the political symbolism, blur the operational accountability — and it rarely speeds anything up for the people actually building things. If Britain wants to look serious about AI, naming who owns the rulebook would matter more than giving a minister a seat at cabinet.
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