Britain risks becoming “dangerously dependent” on a handful of foreign technology companies as artificial intelligence spreads through businesses and public services, the founder of GOV.UK has warned.
Mike Bracken, who created the Government Digital Service and led the building of GOV.UK before advising governments worldwide through his consultancy Public Digital, told City A.M. that institutions are steadily giving up control of critical systems one procurement decision at a time.
“Institutions rarely lose sovereignty in a crisis. They lose it one reasonable decision at a time,” Bracken said. “The biggest risk facing many organisations today is not that somebody takes control away from them. It’s that they gradually give it away.”
The structural problem he identifies is well documented. The leading foundation models, from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, are American, so most AI used by British companies arrives through licences rather than as UK-owned assets, and the specialist chips beneath them are almost entirely imported. EdTech Innovation Hub, reporting his analysis, says policymakers fixate on who owns the technology when the sharper question is who holds the power to change direction.
Bracken argues the loss of control usually surfaces only when an organisation tries to switch supplier or shift course. “Every technology decision can make it harder or easier to change direction in the future,” he said. “Too often, institutions only discover they have lost that flexibility when circumstances demand it.”
His warning lands in the middle of an active government programme. Ministers have committed up to £500 million to a Sovereign AI Unit to back British AI companies, and the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee warned earlier this year that reliance on a small number of US firms is a strategic vulnerability, with one MP calling the public sector’s growing use of Palantir an “unacceptable point of weakness”, TechRound reports.
Not everyone reads dependency as danger. A paper from the British American Business group argues full-stack independence is neither affordable nor desirable, and that the sensible response to concentration is contractual: interoperability, data portability and audit rights that keep switching possible.
Bracken’s quarrel is with the assumption that switching stays possible by default. The organisations that succeed over the next decade, he says, will be the ones that understand whether a technology expands their freedom to act or quietly narrows it, and ask before the contract is signed, not after.