New U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is speeding up efforts to strengthen the national AI industry by appointing Kanishka Narayan as Minister for artificial intelligence (AI).
On the 21st (local time), Prime Minister Burnham appointed Narayan, a Wales-born Labor Party politician, as Minister for AI and directed him to attend the Cabinet. This is the first time in the U.K. that a minister in charge of AI has attended a Cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister.
Narayan, who is of Indian origin, set a record as the first ethnic minority member of Parliament from Wales. During former Prime Minister Keir Starmer's tenure in September 2025, Narayan served as Minister for AI and online safety and kept the portfolio in this reshuffle. In the previous Cabinet, he was at the vice minister level under Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Liz Kendall, but with the launch of the Burnham administration his status rose to Minister for AI attending the Cabinet.
Narayan is said to have earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford University in the United States.
Prime Minister Burnham is reorganizing the government structure as he overhauls the domestic AI industry. He scrapped the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), launched by the Starmer government in 2023, and merged it with the Department for Business and Trade to establish the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, appointing Jonathan Reynolds as Minister. DSIT's existing responsibilities for digital transformation and online harmful content were transferred to the Culture Ministry.
The BBC assessed, "Prime Minister Burnham appears to have judged DSIT to be a single 'science experiment' that did not fully succeed."
Bloomberg reported that the U.K. is regarded as a major AI hub in Europe. Google DeepMind, voice AI company ElevenLabs, and autonomous driving startup Wayve are based in the U.K. It is also seen as having an abundance of venture capital and top-tier engineering talent. Since Brexit, the U.K. has attracted investment from foreign tech companies by touting a more flexible regulatory environment than the European Union (EU).
However, the government has also faced criticism for frequently changing tech policy and not investing enough in the computing infrastructure needed for AI development. Because of high energy prices, major digital infrastructure projects, including an OpenAI data center, have been canceled or put on hold.
For example, DSIT supported quantum computing and clean energy research projects and created "AI growth zones" for building data centers. In the AI growth zones, the government supported permitting and power supply for operators.
However, one of the first large projects in the AI growth zones—OpenAI and U.K. cloud company Nscale's plan to build a data center—ran into trouble early this year. OpenAI pulled out of the project, citing regulation and high energy costs. At the time, Narayan pushed back against claims that the U.K.'s regulations and electricity prices were high enough to block construction of large-scale data centers.
Bloomberg reported that Prime Minister Burnham has revealed little about the concrete direction of his AI and tech policies. In particular, the Burnham government also needs to set out its position on the technology sovereignty debate underway in Europe. France and Germany, concerned that the United States could block overseas corporations' access to cutting-edge AI models, argue that Europe should reduce its dependence on Silicon Valley's AI models and software.