When the billionaire chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia threw a party in central London for Donald Trump’s state visit in September, the power imbalance between Silicon Valley and British politicians was vividly exposed.
Jensen Huang hastened to the stage after meetings at Chequers and rallied his hundreds of guests to cheer on the power of AI. In front of a huge Nvidia logo, he urged the venture capitalists before him to herald “a new industrial revolution”, announced billions of pounds in AI investments and, like Willy Wonka handing out golden tickets, singled out some lucky recipients in the room.
“If you want to get rich, this is where you want to be,” he declared.
But his biggest party trick was a surprise guest waiting in the wings. At Huang’s cue, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, walked out as the crowd whooped at Huang’s pulling power.
Starmer, looking slightly dazed, saluted his host’s “absolutely phenomenal” presentation, told the audience about how he had been “texting away” with Huang and effusively thanked one of the world’s richest men for his “confidence in what we are doing, in your investment, your foresight”. Huang sent him away with a gift: an inscribed AI processing unit.
Not done, Huang called to the stage Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, followed by Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for business. The parade of British cabinet ministers at this private Nvidia event spoke volumes about how successfully US tech oligarchs have pulled British politicians – serving and former – into their orbit.
This week, they landed another big fish. The $500bn ChatGPT maker, Open AI, hired the former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, prompting him to gush he was joining “the most exciting and promising company in the world”.
He was just the latest senior figure to pass through the revolving door between Westminster and Silicon Valley. In October, the former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak took advisory roles with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s main rivals, and with Microsoft, which has invested heavily in both AI startups. Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff, who sits in the House of Lords, also this summer took a senior role at Anthropic after it signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK government.
They followed the former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who spent seven years leading public affairs for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, which runs Instagram and Facebook. Clegg is now an AI investor who last week predicted “we will move from staring at the internet to living in the internet”. He made tens of millions of dollars at Meta. Some reports said as much as $100m. He would not confirm that, but said he was paid “extremely well”.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair, prime minister for a decade until 2007, is becoming increasingly influential on technology policy, lobbying successfully, through his Tony Blair Institute (TBI), for the UK to introduce a digital ID.
TBI is part-funded by the foundation of Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle. A former TBI policy expert, Kirsty Innes, recently became a special adviser to Kendall.
The Commons science, innovation and technology select committee is monitoring the revolving door situation. Alex Sobel MP, a member of parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which is investigating AI, said: “I am deeply concerned tech companies may be using their huge buying power to water down much-needed regulation by hiring those who have served at the highest level of previous governments.”
Jobs with the biggest US AI companies could be a good fit for frontline politicians because they also required comfort with risk-taking, said one tech company insider. Another advantage is that tech leaders do not tend to demand polished management skills. Meanwhile, their value is growing, as AI companies increasingly target their products at government clients as well as businesses and consumers. Osborne’s task appears to be to wedge his foot in the door of governments to help OpenAI inject its technology into the bloodstream of public systems. It already has government-level arrangements with Argentina, Australia, Germany, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Kazakhstan, but it wants more.
Selling state-level AI is competitive. Palantir, which hosted Starmer at its Washington base in February and signed a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Defence in September, is pushing its systems into health trusts, police forces and local councils in Britain. The company’s UK communications are being led by a former head of strategic communications at Downing Street.
Britain is an important place for AI firms to gain influence: regulations on AI development remain looser than in the EU, its universities foster important innovations, and the UK also has one of the world’s most respected AI safety institutes.
The revolving door also spins the other way, sending tech industry people into positions of public influence. The UK government last month appointed Raia Hadsell, the vice-president of research at Google DeepMind, as an “AI ambassador”, alongside Tom Blomfield, the founder of the online bank Monzo. Blomfield is also a partner at Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup incubator that used to be led by Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.
Civil servants from the government’s digital service set up a consultancy called Public Digital, which has since won millions of pounds worth of public contracts. One of its partners, Emily Middleton, last year took a senior director general role in the government’s digital service.
