As part of its “reindustrialisation” strategy, new UK prime minister Andy Burnham’s government needs to recognise the importance of open source in the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, as a report by OpenUK has highlighted concerns over UK AI sovereignty that policymakers need to address to ensure access to key technologies.
In her introduction to the AI openness report, OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock noted that the export control exerted through presidential executive orders by Donald Trump has seen the US “rock the world”. “It denied access to chips for China and certain AI for non-US citizens,” she said. “The perhaps-unintended consequence of this has been to drive users to China’s open source.”
In the report, James Drayson, co-founder and CEO at Locai Labs, said: “For organisations already worried about control, data security, intellectual property leakage and unpredictable API [application programming interface] pricing, [these] policy positions have converted a hypothetical concern into a reality and a precedent.
“This has prompted a movement back towards on-prem deployment in the UK and other worried nation states,” he added. “Openness is precisely what turns a capable model into a trusted foundation. The ask is simple: if you want enterprises to build on your model, show them what it’s made of.”
The report notes that business strategies and monetisation of AI should focus on evolving technologies and new approaches leveraging the existing models as a base.
“The US’s frontier models have been met head-on by open-weight models like Kimi K3,” it said. “Systems thinking needs applying to the UK’s planning in the way China planned its journey to open source success.”
OpenUK noted that the DeepSeek AI model was pivotal in establishing China as an AI leader. It also demonstrated the effectiveness of open collaboration and open source in its development. “This success is enabled by the right infrastructure which must be mapped,” it said.
OpenUK urged policymakers to consider the main requirements for technological sovereignty in the UK. The organisation believes tech sovereignty is only about independence from international companies, but also requires the UK to manage its own technologies directly.
“We must stop giving those we develop to others to hold, manage and monetise,” it said. “The data tells us that the UK is not well served by throwing money at building new large or frontier models. The opportunity to hone in on with a laser focus is the model-adjacent technologies in the AI harnesses, infrastructure and developer tooling. The lower barrier to entry is enabling individuals and innovators to break into this space.”
Brock added: “Collaborating through their traditional GitHub platform over Hugging Face they are building the adjacent technologies that are becoming the open standards of AI and even the proprietary model owners want a piece of that action, setting up US foundations to host them and building soft power.”
She urged policymakers to mimic the soft power that has been established in the US by supporting the establishment of a UK-based foundation for open source projects, akin to the US’s Linux Foundation. “That’s not a lab or a policy shop, but a technical base built by our ecosystem’s deep experts rather than continuing to build the pipeline of innovation for other nations to leverage,” said Brock.
