UK to assess risks of consumers losing access to frontier AI models
By Jack Aldane on 24/08/2026 | Updated on 24/08/2026
Photo: Daniil Komov/Pexels
The UK government said it plans to assess what could happen to the country’s economy and national security if British users lost access to frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The UK’s Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade will assess the impact on growth and cybersecurity if Britons were no longer able to use models produced by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, according to a report in the Financial Times. The assessment is set to be completed within weeks.
The assessment was prompted by US president Donald Trump’s move in June to limit access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 model.
Anthropic was ordered to to suspend the export of its Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 AI models and to prevent its use by foreign nationals, whether they reside in the US or abroad amid fears that they could be deployed to intelligence services in countries like China and Russia and used to commit cyberattacks.
Read more: US forces Anthropic to shut down latest AI models, citing national security concerns
Although the model was subsequently launched globally, the UK review will aim to understand what impact future restrictions could have.
Commenting on the plan, Dame Chi Onwurah, Labour chair of the House of Commons science, technology and innovation committee, said that while she welcomed the government’s efforts to understand the impact of “being cut off” from AI innovation, what remained pressing was to develop “a plan to address unacceptable levels of dependency, and indeed how an acceptable level of dependency is defined”.
“Government needs a realistic plan to achieve sovereign capabilities in critical areas or risk having its access cut off at the whim of its partners”, she told the Financial Times.
Read more: How should governments respond to AI agents going rogue?
Monitoring risks closely
This assessment by the UK government comes as a time when there is also a focus on AI safety, with AI agents in both the UK and US having acted unpredictably in testing environments. These incidents have added to fears that governments are unprepared to prevent or manage the fallout of agents going rogue.
In the US, a bill calling for the introduction of an AI ‘kill switch’ was tabled after an OpenAI agent hacked a tech startup in July. In response to a similar event involving an agent that took unsanctioned actions in the UK, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said that it had observed “a shift in the risk landscape”.
Both the UK Home Office and the US federal government have also been monitoring the prevalence of AI-powered risks to consumers and citizens, including schemes to defraud and abuse targets, and spread misinformation.
