While the Online Safety Act was praised, any prospects for AI regulation felt like a distant memory in a programme dominated by public investment in tech infrastructure and skills
AI investments, especially related to infrastructure and skills, dominated London Tech Week
9 June 2025 saw the start of London Tech Week. The week long conference featured keynote addresses from government leaders and tech CEOs alongside panels featuring representatives from industry, government, regulators and the third sector. Sessions and exhibits were dominated by talk of boosting AI investment and adoption, with Dan Milmo (Global Technology Editor, The Guardian) succinctly summarising the challenge of the conference as separating excessive hype from reasonable hope. Announcements on new public investment in developing AI infrastructures in the UK steered debate towards whether the country is prepared to compete with the US and China in global tech markets. Elsewhere, conversations picked up on themes of tech sovereignty and recapturing market value in the UK, as has been top of the agenda in the EU, as well as the UK’s position as a global leader in online safety regulation.
Apparent consensus on AI’s role in economic growth as well as how to maximise it in the UK
The first session saw a keynote address from Sir Keir Starmer (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) followed by a panel in which he joined Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia) in conversation about the importance of AI to economic growth and the UK’s plans to invest in the sector. Starmer opened his remarks by emphasising the tangible, everyday capabilities of AI – such as in education and healthcare – against a broader economic picture of the sector, which he noted was responsible for 2m jobs and grew at a rate 30 times faster than the rest of the British economy in recent years. To capitalise on these benefits, he set out his goal for the Government to become the best state partner for tech entrepreneurs around the world, reflected in public funding commitments for developing compute infrastructure and expanding AI skills education from primary schools to post graduate and the workforce. Huang similarly predicted a transformative near future in AI, suggesting that AI would become the next infrastructure akin to electricity or connectivity. In a subsequent panel, Jean Innes (CEO, Alan Turing Institute) and Matt Clifford CBE (UK Prime Minister Advisor on AI Opportunities and Chair of ARIA, UK Government) agreed emphatically that AI will power economic growth and that the challenge is capturing that growth in the UK and ensuring the positive impacts of it are felt by consumers and workers. The two were also pressed on the significant environmental impact of AI but instead steered the conversation towards how the technology would actually speed up the clean energy transition and work to predict severe weather events and climate tipping points.
Speakers aimed for reclaiming tech market value in Europe from the US for both economic and security reasons
In a familiar call to those being made in the EU, Clifford also emphasised the need for sovereign AI to be developed in order to effectively compete on the global stage but argued that the UK is well-positioned and that its AI talent is already the envy of the world. Arthur Mensch (Co-Founder and CEO, Mistral AI) echoed this message in describing how he began Mistral AI with the conviction that the EU was not simply going to export its talent and innovation to Silicon Valley. He cited the development of the cloud market, and the dominance of US-based hyperscalers, as a key moment in which tech market value began flowing out of Europe and back to the US at scale. In line with the public investment plans announced by Starmer and Peter Kyle MP (Secretary of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)), Mensch predicted that recapturing this value was possible not only in building innovative software that runs on top of the infrastructure but also by building the data infrastructure in Europe and scaling European cloud providers. In his keynote, Kyle offered the stark warning that failing to bring tech investment to British shores would result in a “poorer, weaker, more vulnerable” UK.
While discussions on regulating AI were absent, the Online Safety Act was applauded
Across the week and elsewhere around the conference, speakers were clear that regulatory change for the better is on its way, particularly in efforts to simplify processes and reduce bureaucracy. While Clifford and Innes were praised regulators for their work on adopting of AI, other panellists, such as Matt Smith (Vice President, Global Entrepreneurship Network) and Lord David Willetts (Chair, Regulatory Innovation Office), were more blunt with their critiques of where regulation is holding technological advancements back, including in the drone industry. Kyle did offer some respite and explained that regulatory compliance was going to go from taking years, to merely months, though offering little detail on specific regulatory changes that may be upcoming. No mention was made of legislation to regulate AI, either, despite such a law being a key campaign commitment made by the Labour Party only one year ago during the General Election and the ongoing debate around reforming copyright protections to accommodate AI’s data demands. In one of the few sessions without an explicit focus on AI, Dame Melanie Dawes (CEO, Ofcom) offered praise for UK regulation, describing the Online Safety Act and its implementation as “of a standard that is different from what you will see elsewhere.” She specifically highlighted Ofcom’s position as an independent regulator removed from political decision-making, unlike the EC in its role within the Digital Services Act, and pointed to its work on age verification as evidence of flexibility and good faith efforts to understand the businesses of the firms it regulates.
