British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pitches UK as home of A.I. safety regulation as London bids to be next Silicon Valley
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks to the media during London Tech Week at the QEII centre on June 12, 2023.
Ian Vogler | Wpa Pool | Getty Images
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a big pitch to the tech community Monday, casting the U.K. as a global center for artificial intelligence and regulation of the technology.
“We must act and act quickly if we want not only to retain our position as one of the world’s tech capitals, but to go even further and make this the best country in the world to start grow and invest in tech businesses,” Sunak said, addressing a crowded tech conference in London Monday.
“I feel a sense of urgency and responsibility to make sure that we see things because one of my five priorities is to grow our economy. And the more we innovate, the more we grow.”
“I want to make the U.K. not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak added.
The U.K. is trying to compete with global giants in the arena of AI, one of the most hyped areas of tech currently in the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.
Separately, the country is also pitching itself as the “next Silicon Valley,” with Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt making several reforms to the country’s financial regulations to encourage more venture capital investment and listings from high-growth technology firms.
Much of the most commercially advanced work around the technology is originating from the U.S., with major companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and other tech giants, such as Google (which bought U.K.-based AI company DeepMind in 2014) and Meta, making huge investments in generative AI in particular.
However, the U.K. is trying to make measures of its own to be more of a leader in the world of AI. The government in March published a white paper detailing its plan for AI regulation, which sought to take a principles-based approach to the technology rather than proposing new tailored regulations.
Sunak last week announced the first global AI safety summit in the U.K. later this year, looking to make a bold commitment on Britain’s position in the global regulatory discourse surrounding the technology as officials in the U.S., European Union and beyond seek to get a handle on AI.
Last month, the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic made a visit to the U.K., speaking with the prime minister about their approach to ensuring safe development of AI. AI leaders are trying to convince officials that they are keeping safety in mind when creating advanced AI models, as
There is currently no concrete regulation for AI in any major developed nation. The European Union is seeking to change that with the EU AI Act, which lawmakers are due to vote on in Parliament later this week. But these are laws that are unlikely to come into force until well into the future.
The U.K. has seen some of its most decorated tech firms sour on the country as a place to begin a tech business, with the critical Cambridge-based chip design firm Arm opting to list in New York in favor of London earlier this year, and the CEO of Revolut saying he would “never list” in London citing an unfavorable tax regime and bureaucratic regulation.
Sunak defied naysayers about the U.K. technology prospects on Monday. In conversation with the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Sunak said that Britain is “already a great place to scale up a tech business.”
“Over the last decade, [there have been] more unicorns in this country than anywhere other than the U.S. and China. I think that’s a pretty good record and a good base for us to start from, but obviously we need to keep doing well, we need to keep pushing ourselves.”
“Something like half of all of our fastest-growing innovation businesses have a foreign-born founder, so that tells you you need a visa system that attracts the best and the brightest to the U.K. And I think we’ve got one.”
Hassabis, who recently was promoted to lead Google’s AI research efforts, said he has seen the culture around fostering entrepreneurship in the U.K. change over the years.
“When we started DeepMind back in 2010, things were very different then. I remember our first investors, who were U.S.-based, and we had to go to the U.S. to get our first investment, sort of suspicious of if you could build huge deep tech companies anywhere other than Silicon Valley.
“I think it is a lot easier to start and grow very difficult and very meaningful, the tech companies. So you know, it’s been it’s been great to see that I think there’s a huge opportunity to come here.”
WATCH: Can China’s ChatGPT clones give it an edge over the U.S. in an A.I. arms race?
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Read the full Bloomberg story here.
— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
WATCH: Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital’s Chris Ballard
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
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