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

Britain is to spend £100m on a "world first" AI Biosecurity Lab as part of Wednesday's Budget, the government has announced, according to the BBC.

The new national AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL), backed by leading artificial intelligence firms, will strengthen the country's defences against emerging biological threats, though full details of its role and remit are still to emerge. AI minister Kanishka Narayan described it as a "major new global institution" that will bring together world-leading scientific expertise to safeguard the UK as AI develops.

Chancellor John Healey is also pledging millions more across a package of measures targeting cyber, biological and AI-enabled threats. OpenAI and Anthropic will support the new lab with £200m worth of AI model credits.

"AI will transform daily life: every firm, community, hospital, school, and every aspect of our economy can benefit," Healey said, setting out what he called a distinctively British approach to AI — one that does not leave workers behind and defends the national interest.

Beyond the lab, the Chancellor is committing an extra £120m to the UK's AI Security Institute, the body set up in 2023 to evaluate the risks of the most advanced AI models. A £60m "National Cyber Shield" will use agentic AI to bolster cyber-defences, while £70m will fund a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre to hunt for vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure and the economy.

The announcement follows a global scramble over critical flaws in the PHP programming language, dubbed php2shell, which prompted the UK government to take some sites offline as a precaution. No successful exploits have been reported, but experts warn long-dormant bugs can now be surfaced — and potentially exploited — using AI.