UK firms ‘should be worried’ about Anthropic’s latest AI model, minister says

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UK businesses “should be worried” about the ability of Anthropic’s latest AI model to spot cyber security flaws, but defending against such threats offers prospects for growth, according to the minister responsible for the technology.

Kanishka Narayan said the British government wanted to “make the most of the opportunities” in a growing market to defend companies against AI-assisted hacking after Anthropic said Claude Mythos Preview had identified thousands of vulnerabilities in widely used software.

The announcement by the San Francisco start-up this month sparked alarm across businesses, regulators and governments around the world.

“We should be worried. The best protection against those worries is to act to build capability defensively, but also to make the most of the opportunities,” Narayan told the FT.

Asked if the emergence of Mythos was an opportunity for Britain, he said: “Yes. And Anthropic just announced today a massive expansion of their offices here.”

Defence of advanced systems against AI-assisted threats will be a priority for the UK’s £500mn Sovereign AI unit, which launched on Thursday with a host of initial investment in British start-ups.

The UK government will take a “right of first refusal” to invest in start-ups in exchange for access to computing capacity, biotech research labs or certain public datasets, in a new form of state backing designed to encourage companies in key sectors to stay in Britain.

James Wise, chair of the unit, said it marked “a new financial instrument the government hasn’t used before to build these kinds of relationships in a very collaborative way”.

The fund will invest £500mn through a mixture of such deals and equity investment, as well as government procurement.

“Historically, we’ve given a lot of this away as grants, which is great . . . [but] the upside often ends up with entirely the companies,” Wise said, adding that offering access on “commercial terms” would ensure “the taxpayer has some upside in this”.

But Wise — a venture capitalist at Balderton, which has backed AI companies such as Wayve — said the government would not require start-ups to remain in the UK, rather than moving to Silicon Valley, to scale up.

“We think introducing those kinds of terms, we’re probably [self]-defeating in the long run,” Wise said, noting that government backing was designed to ensure companies “don’t feel like they need to move abroad”.

Success would be measured by whether “on average” UK start-ups were more likely to succeed here, he added.

Anthropic has made Mythos available only to a select group of mainly Big Tech companies so far, in order to help secure their systems before it is offered more widely.

Narayan stressed the UK National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of signals intelligence agency GCHQ, was “able to move quickly to ensure protection of critical national infrastructure”. But he said he wanted to improve awareness in the private sector of the threat.

Asked if firms that defended against the kind of vulnerabilities exposed by Mythos would be a focus of the Sovereign AI unit, Wise said: “100 per cent. Within the first priority areas . . . agentic security, AI, safety and security is one of those key areas”.

The unit has been set up as a standalone team within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology designed to nurture promising AI start-ups in areas deemed strategically important, including security and life sciences.

The UK had “this incredibly rich ecosystem around AI security”, said Wise, citing the country’s security services, the AI Security Institute and the presence of cyber security companies such as Darktrace.

“Some of those people are now leaving to start up their own businesses here in Britain, and I hope Sovereign AI is the first port of call,” he added.

Even as the government seeks to curb immigration to the UK, Narayan said visas would be fast-tracked for companies backed by the unit, arguing that voters would back efforts to attract top scientists and engineers from overseas.

“Britain is now one of the best places in the world to start businesses and bring exceptional talent into the country,” he said.