Britain needs a taskforce specifically charged with encouraging well-capitalised US tech firms to set up second homes in Britain, says Abigail Morris
It’s London Tech Week, but while AI is all anyone is talking about at Olympia, it’s been largely overlooked in general election discourse.
This is despite the fact that AI innovations as a threat to humanity are included alongside ‘election worthy topics’ such as climate change and nuclear war in the Doomsday Clock calculations. But the UK’s policy spotlight on AI safety over the past year has also proved there is a new market here, and that the UK is alongside the US at the forefront of it.
This transatlantic tech trade has huge benefits. This isn’t just about big firms operating cross border but also start-up British AI firms growing almost concurrently in two locations, such as Humanloop who are hiring in London and San Francisco and Robin AI with bases in London and New York. This approach makes sense in a competitive race for talent and with complementary time zones. In 2024, a business can be pretty small and still have a very successful multi-country footprint to propel their growth.
We rightly shout about the success of these British start-ups alongside the already big players such as DeepMind, but it is equally a coup to have the big North American AI companies set up their second offices in the UK. Anthropic was set up with safety at the heart of its frontier research and new systems. Now worth $5bn, it chose London as its first location outside the US. Open AI and Cohere also chose London for their first expansion overseas, with Open AI specifically sighting talent here in Britain as the rationale for choosing the capital as it’s second home.
The most obvious benefit here is the creation of highly skilled jobs in Britain, but the wider value is in what those people go on to do next. Dozens of my previous colleagues at British unicorn Deliveroo have gone on to set up their own businesses, hiring more people, creating more value.
These US firms I mentioned are bringing exceptional talent together in well-funded businesses and as these colleagues sit together, have lunch together and maybe go out for a drink together, they will inspire each other and in turn forge new enterprises together. So here’s a policy idea for the manifestos – alongside the welcome but inevitable focus on growing homegrown start-ups and the importance research and policy focus on AI Safety – the next Government should have a ‘2HQ’ taskforce, specifically charged with going to the US and imploring even more of their well-capitalised tech firms to set up their second home in Britain.
The transatlantic tech trade is already strong but further encouragement could see it boom.
Abigail Morris is an Associate Partner at Shearwater and the former Director of Comms at DSIT