Liz Kendall warned yesterday that artificial intelligence is the “currency of the future” and said countries such as Britain risk becoming dependent on a handful of companies with oligopolistic control over vital digital infrastructure. The science, innovation and technology secretary called for tighter cooperation among “middle powers” including fellow democracies in Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Oceania, saying they should build a resilient digital ecosystem that is not reliant on “the powerful, unaccountable few.”
Her speech on AI sovereignty landed in the middle of a broader argument about who will control the technology that underpins the next stage of economic power. Earlier this year, Mark Carney used Davos to call for “a strategic alliance of law-abiding, middle-ranking powers,” a line that now echoes in Kendall’s appeal for democratic partners to work together before the field narrows further.
The warning also came against a sharper political backdrop. The article frames Kendall’s remarks amid concern that the US is pulling away from Europe in technological power, while Westminster attention was focused on the Peter Mandelson saga. Mandelson’s last public policy intervention as ambassador, only days before he was sacked, was a lecture on the geopolitics of technology.
That context matters because the argument for digital sovereignty is no longer abstract. It is bound up with the way Donald Trump is described in the article: volatile, capricious and unreasonable, yet flattered by pageantry and willing to threaten to bin UK-US trade deals and impose new tariffs. Against that kind of uncertainty, Kendall’s message was not a call for autarky but for shared strength among countries that still want to shape the rules rather than rent the infrastructure from others.
The practical question now is whether that coalition can move faster than the companies and governments shaping the market. Kendall did not present AI as a future battleground to be admired from the sidelines. She treated it as the system that will decide how power is distributed, and she argued that Britain and its allies have to build for that reality before dependence becomes permanent.
