Minister Narayan AI speech at Founders Forum - Feb 10
|
Kanishka Narayan, Minister for AI and Online Safety, spoke at
Founders Forum on 10 February 2026. "Thank you, Carolyn, the Tech
Nation, London AI Founders and Merantix teams. When
I said I wanted to share our AI vision and delivery news with our
founders… …I knew I wanted to do it at the heart of
Britain's AI community. Within a year, you have created
that here, at the London AI Hub. Thank you
for...Request free trial
Kanishka Narayan, Minister for AI and Online Safety, spoke at Founders Forum on 10 February 2026. "Thank you, Carolyn, the Tech Nation, London AI Founders and Merantix teams. When I said I wanted to share our AI vision and delivery news with our founders… …I knew I wanted to do it at the heart of Britain's AI community. Within a year, you have created that here, at the London AI Hub. Thank you for doing so and thank you for opening its doors tonight. Historical heritage 175 years ago, London's makers similarly opened up their doors. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, the world came to London and saw the first wave of mass-produced consumer goods. Most of it was what textile designer and social activist William Morris called ”shoddy”— cheap, poorly made, and “ugly”. Critics of these goods argued it was designed by machines to mimic hand-made luxury, except without the soul. But Morris didn't reject the machine. Along with the Arts and Crafts movement, he demanded that the machine be the servant of the craftsman. They built the Kelmscott Press, treating the “technology” of printing as a way to create the most beautiful books in history. They challenged the decline in printing… …ushered in a new aesthetic… …exerted greater agency… …and inspired the Private Press movement. This fork of 1851 is perhaps one of the most significant moments in the history of design. It put to humans a central question: Does the machine exist to serve what is beautiful about the world, or to replace it with dull mimicry detached from our humanity? For Morris, that question of aesthetic was grounded in the question of agency: Is technology wielded by humans, or is the beauty of our life injured by our service to machines? 175 years on, I believe we face Morris' question again. Indeed, I believe it to be the central question today for both our startups and our politics. Faced with Grok stripping human dignity… …do we wield agency, or does technology? With model releases now separated by months, , how do British startups build with agency, to real needs that persist? With model releases now separated by months, how do British startups build with agency, to real needs that persist? In fear of AI's jobs impact, can we enhance human labour or are we bystanders in its erosion? My primary purpose tonight is to tell you a simple vision: This government will wield agency over technology to serve the power of our labour… …the need of our economy… …the joy of our aesthetic… … and the depth of our British values. The context for founders Today, British tech's challenge is this: before we can steer the wheel, we need to get to the front of the bus. We need greater British technology ownership before we can demand deeper British technology influence. In my maiden speech , I talked about the shock that no working-age person in this country had seen a start-up go to the FTSE top ten. In the US, 8 out of 10 had. The last decade and a half failed to exercise British agency. In the most fruitful period for technology businesses, Britain did not get a seat on the bus. Part of that is because previous governments made us into burdened Britons… …carrying greater risk in our frozen wages… …our flat pensions… …our eroded public services… …not the buccaneering Britons we had been and must be again. Already, we have begun to break glass on our frozen heritage of curious adventure. Our changes to Enterprise Management Incentives now make Britain pretty much the best tax system in the world to chase curiosity as a startup tech employee…. …Our pension reforms, our ramp up in BBB scaleup capital deployment, mean British buccaneering will finally get the rocket booster of British bucks…. …Our changes to research funding – a focus on curiosity-driven research, backed with funding to commercialise – mean returning to our heritage of moonshot invention and industrial application together. And to fire up our imagination for adventure, we have some of our best tech leaders banging the drum for startups… …whether that be Tom Blomfield as our AI Ambassador for British startups and scale ups, talent and investment or Katie Gallagher, our AI Sector Champion for Digital and Tech. Above all, we have put fiscal credibility and financial responsibility back at the heart of government. I came into politics after a career advising FTSE firms and investing in our startups, because I believed in a clear economic mission: Keir Starmer's commitment to restoring stability and trust in the public finances. Because markets punish uncertainty without hesitation. We saw that in the chaos of the Truss era - capital pulled back, confidence evaporated, a risk premium priced into everything. Many have since forgotten that this is not some abstract Treasury concern: it is the basis of a young families' mortgage… …of local councils' finances in managing potholes… …parks, our public spaces… …the basis of dignity for millions of borrowers in this country… …and of growth and prosperity, across this country. It is the stability that marked 2025 as the year financial credibility returned, the year the UK startup economy roared back to life. Investment is flowing again. Founders are building with confidence. The pipeline from idea to scale is wide open once more. Last year, UK startups and scale-ups raised around $24 billion in venture capital, nearly 35 per cent up on the year before, one of the strongest performances on record. UK AI startups alone raised almost $8 billion, roughly a third of all venture capital invested into British tech. And the UK is once again Europe's startup engine, producing more unicorns than France and Germany combined. Celebrating success But let me be candid. Our lost opportunity was not just down to those who didn't take risk… …it was down to us failing to value those who did. Somewhere in our history, we let ourselves be captured by that most vicious guard of conservative privilege: the tall poppy syndrome. We forgot that the root of the tall poppy tale, thousands of years old, wasn't some egalitarian impulse; it was, in fact, the most egregiously privileged advice of King Tarquin Superbus to his son: that the path to elite control for kings ran through the total destruction of common merit and talent. We can course correct from that fork of fake British mythology.So when people say to me today: we don't celebrate those who have taken risk and succeeded. I say back: we have agency on this question, so why don't we start today? Now is the time to recognise the innovators that are shaping the future, right here in the UK. The entrepreneurial spirit of Arm's pioneering founders created a world-leading semiconductor firm that is spear-heading the development of transformative new technologies, including AI. This would not have been possible without each of those twelve individuals… …Jamie Urquhart, Mike Muller, Tudor Brown, Lee Smith, John Biggs, Harry Oldham, Dave Howard, Pete Harrod, Harry Meekings, Al Thomas, Andy Merritt, and David Seal. It's time that we recognise their contribution to innovation, and the contribution of founders across the UK's technology stack. Cleo's Barney Hussey-Yeo is driving financial services transformation. Quantinuum's Ilyas Khan is accelerating quantum computing to unlock the technology's full potential. ElevenLabs's Mati [MAH-tee] Staniszewski [Stan-EE-shev-ski] and Piotr [PEE-oh-ter] Dabkowski [Dab-COV-ski] are stretching the boundaries of voice generation to supercharge translation, transcription and agentic capabilities. The risks that these founders took are driving growth and prosperity in the UK. I want to continue recognising these achievements, and so each year I will showcase the innovative founders who are transforming the UK for the better. And as I do so, I'm committed to ensuring we celebrate the full breadth of that talent. The UK remains the largest hub for female-founded innovation in Europe, as recognised by the 2025 Female Innovation Index… …Yet we know that our technology ecosystem still skews heavily male. The Secretary of State and I are determined to change that… …That is why we launched the Women in Tech Taskforce in December- to address the barriers that prevent women from starting tech businesses, entering the sector, or progressing once they're in. If women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men, our economy could see a £250 billion boost. So we will champion the game-changing work that is being done by the women who are blazing the way in tech leadership. Women like Starling Bank's Anne Boden, PensionBee's Romi Savova, and Resi's Alex Depledge, who is also serving this country as an Entrepreneurship Advisor to the UK's first female Chancellor. This is the talent that will cement the UK as a global tech leader. And we should be aiming this high. My ambition, within the next 5 years, is to name a trillion-dollar founder from our shores. Some may say that setting out this target in such terms is its own risk… …to them I say that government is embracing the mentality that has been so successful for our ambitious founders. Opportunity dispersed Yet, even when we have fixed our relationship with risk, we have a choice to make. We could have fixed it for elites. We could have spared tall poppies Tarquin's cull. That was the pattern of the SaaS and smartphone revolutions, the trend of frontier tech in the last 2 decades: let elites build, let the rest benefit. That cannot be the trend of the next 2 decades. AI's opportunity is too spread to encourage that narrow vision: it's not just concentrated code, but diffuse physics, that will determine AI's impact. Crucially, Britain's strength is a separate trend: British tech has done best when we have spread opportunity. There is a reason that our largest UK-listed tech company started in 1981 when a local printing firm owner asked a university student to automate his quotes and accounting. The automation worked so well, they decided to quit printing and start selling. Plotting their startup at the Rose and Crown pub, they saw a herb poster on the wall: having ditched calling their company Parsley Systems, Rosemary Systems and Basil Systems, they landed on the startup's name: Sage Systems. Over 4 decades on, that green herb is Britain's pride, our largest UK-listed tech company, still headquartered in Newcastle. The Sage effect in Newcastle… …the ARM effect in Cambridge… …the Admiral Group effect in South Wales… …the Deepmind effect in King's Cross… …the Skyscanner effect in Scotland… …the THG effect in Manchester. Each of these is the effect of remarkable founding teams, and each is in turn the cause of huge lifts in opportunity in their places. That is why we have announced not just ~£28 billion in AI Growth Zone infrastructure in my first 4 months in this role, but we have announced it in deep areas of strength: …5,000 jobs in the North East… …over 8,000 jobs in North and South Wales… …over 3,000 jobs in Lanarkshire. In this tech revolution, Britain is proving that opportunity spread is opportunity scaled. It is why we are announcing £27 million for TechLocal, spreading skills training and better job placements in tech right across our country… …It is why I whizzed around every nation, 6 cities in just over 24 hours, to see our Regional Tech Boosters building startup communities like this one in each nation of the United Kingdom… …It is why this government has thrown open the doors of opportunity. Harold Wilson did it with the Open University; with that Wilsonian sense of scale, our programme to support AI skills is now targeting 10 million workers – almost a third of our workforce – skilled in AI by 2030. British agency In all this, we have to remember that the opportunity of tech is not just in who builds, but in what we build. That is especially so because Britain has a history of building things that expand agency, extending what we can each do. When Britain set joint stock ownership, we extended the agency of entrepreneurs scaling risk by widening the scope of who could share in that risk; When a Briton submitted the first proposal for a World Wide Web, we extended the agency of people sharing knowledge on an open internet. When Britain led with open data, and with data platforms such as UK Biobank, we extended the agency of citizen engagement and frontier research alike. When tech was starting to become opaque, the reserve of a few, it was Britain that put capability back into people's hands. Raspberry Pi, born in Cambridge and manufactured in Wales, was designed to be cheap, hackable and understandable. It restored agency — to students, hobbyists, engineers and schools alike. In doing so it made a fully programmable general-purpose computer that gives a student in Nairobi, São Paulo or Manchester the chance to learn on the same platform, with the same tools. In keeping with that British tradition, of tech that extends human agency, I will reaffirm today what we have felt deeply in government: Britain will be the home of global open source AI talent. We have fellowships, with Alan Turing Institute and Meta, to back open source talent in government. We have tools – including via the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) – that build open source infrastructure. The UK, through AISI , has developed the world's most widely used government-backed evaluation tools. Inspect, InspectSandbox, InspectCyber, and our latest release, ControlArena, are now being used by governments, companies, and academics around the world. These open tools lower the barrier to high‑quality evaluation and make safety science accessible at scale. AI Infrastructure If we do this – restore agency in taking risk, in succeeding, in building across our country– we will have done a huge service. We will have also done it by restoring another sort of agency: the agency of the state, our collective vehicle for progress. Perhaps, to some of you, the words agency and state don't obviously go together. But the reality is that the history of the British state is not one of passivity – those are just the Conservative aberrations, the Reform allegations – the history of the British state is one of agency. Alongside the agency of our modern health service, the foundation for our life sciences sector, we have a proud history of Harold Wilson's technological agency. In Callaghan's government, another undersold story of state agency. For it was “a Labour government that backed the creation of Inmos in 1978 with £50 million to establish a UK semiconductor industry. Housed in Bristol and Newport, Inmos went on to make a moonshot product – the revolutionary Transputer, designed for parallel computing decades before multi-core processors became industry standard. Inmos didn't ultimately survive, sold too early by Thatcher. But the original Inmos facility in Wales then became the seed for Wales' world-leading compound semiconductor cluster, offering a lifeline to a community amidst declining steel jobs, now offering us the chance at global leadership in that critical industry. When I visited the cluster, I saw an exceptional set of apprenticeships for young women, breaking every stereotype of what British tech could be. Where the last decade of SaaS meant SWE jobs in SWE cities only, that hardware cluster flipped the conventional chains that tie class to earnings, restoring craft, pride in human labour, good pay for a good factory job in a high-tech sector. Workers at Inmos didn't just seed Wales' semis cluster. A handful left to join another fledgling British startup. In 1981, British startup Acorn Computers won the hardware contract for BBC Micro, the BBC's computer literacy programme. Within years, Acorn joined forces to spin out a small, asset-light chip design startup in a turkey barn in Cambridgeshire. Shortening the Acorn RISC Machine, they called the company ARM. Today, the legacy of Inmos, with the boost of the BBC's procurement, is the world's premier chip design IP firm, valued at over $100 billion. We are picking up where Labour's semiconductor legacy left us, and we are spreading it across each part of our startup economy. I am, therefore, delighted to announce today Fractile, is confirming £100 million of new investment in its UK headquarters over the next 3 years, underlining its commitment to building advanced AI hardware capability in Britain. The investment will expand its London and Bristol sites, create a new UK industrial hardware engineering facility, and grow its UK-based team to develop and optimise next-generation system. A British AI inference chip startup, rooted in Inmos and ARM's legacy, now relentlessly chasing the future. Conclusion When you all similarly chase the future, you will find in Britain a government in the service of startup Britain. I mean that in practice, not just in slogan. And because Andy Grove was right – what matters is high output management, not loud politics. You will have a government that will measure its output in public, with a new AI Opportunities Action Plan dashboard… …A government acting as an investment amplifier, driving tens of billions of investments in tech ventures. Establishing a standalone Sovereign AI unitthat will operate at market pace, equipped with £500 million, investing into high-potential British AI start-ups… …A government acting to secure British national security with our National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF)… …And a government here to celebrate your remarkable achievements: ~$24 billion raised in venture in 2025, the best tech ecosystem outside of California… …A government making sure you have the compute to turn AI ideas into economic opportunity. In just the time I have been in post, we have secured over £68 billon in AIinfrastructure and research investment; underpinned by significant planning and energy reforms. We are putting over £1 billon of public compute, the AIResearch Resource (AIRR), in the service of British startups and research… …When you have built with capital and compute, you will have a government willing to be a first-class customer, putting enterprise sales cycles to shame. With novel chips, we will do so with a £100 million Advance Market Commitment… …In our recent planning and education AI procurements, a government willing to accelerate procurement processes… …A government that knows community – the collective force of our talent – is the biggest determinant of our success. With a dedicated AI stream for global talent, reimbursing visa fees and accelerating visa process, alongside a domestic obsession with support for British kids training in AI… …And, finally, a government that knows the central question for us is one of culture: a culture of relentless agency, shared opportunity and extended human ability, so we meet Morris' challenge and put machines in service, once again, of British agency." |