The United Kingdom government is committing £100 million to establish a national Artificial Intelligence Biosecurity Lab as part of a wider package of investments aimed at protecting the country from emerging biological, cyber and AI-related threats.

The proposed facility, described by the government as a world-first initiative, will bring together scientific and technology experts to examine how artificial intelligence can be used to identify and counter threats to national security.

Leading AI companies are expected to support the project, while the government plans to commit additional funds to strengthen cybersecurity, advanced technology and the protection of critical national infrastructure.

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said the laboratory would become an important international centre for tackling emerging risks associated with rapidly developing technologies.

He said the initiative would help the UK anticipate threats ranging from cyberattacks to biological risks while strengthening the technological capabilities required to protect the country.

The government has yet to provide full details of how the laboratory will operate or the specific responsibilities it will assume.

As part of the wider package, OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to provide £200 million worth of credits for access to their respective AI models to support government work.

The government is also allocating an additional £120 million to the UK’s AI Security Institute, which was established in 2023 to study and evaluate the potential risks posed by increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems.

The additional investment is intended to support the institute’s research and help develop technical safeguards and standards as governments and technology companies grapple with the risks associated with advanced AI.

Another £60 million will be directed towards a proposed National Cyber Shield, which is expected to use agentic artificial intelligence to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect and respond to cyber threats.

A further £70 million will fund the proposed National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability Centre, known as NERV.

The centre is expected to deploy AI technologies to identify weaknesses in computer systems and critical infrastructure across the UK, enabling authorities and organisations to address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

Defence Secretary John Healey said artificial intelligence had the potential to significantly improve people’s lives and deliver benefits across businesses, communities, hospitals, schools and the wider economy.

He said the government was developing a specifically British approach to AI that would take into account concerns among workers, protect national interests and ensure that the economic gains generated by the technology were broadly distributed.

Narayan said investment in domestic scientific research, advanced semiconductor technology and British AI companies would contribute not only to national security but also to the rebuilding of industrial capacity and the creation of highly skilled employment.

The new spending package comes amid growing international concern over the ability of AI to accelerate both cyber defence and cyberattacks.

The UK government recently disclosed that it was among organisations around the world that temporarily took some websites offline as a precaution after researchers uncovered serious vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used extensively in web development.

Although there have been no confirmed successful attacks exploiting the vulnerability, dubbed “php2shell”, researchers warned that affected systems could potentially be targeted.

Cybersecurity specialists have also raised concerns that increasingly capable AI systems could enable malicious actors to discover and exploit previously overlooked weaknesses in software more rapidly.

The UK government’s latest measures are therefore aimed at expanding its capacity to identify emerging threats while developing domestic technologies and expertise considered essential to national security.