Britain is sleepwalking into AI dependency - We must wake up and build our own future before it's too late

It follows Keir Starmer’s similarly titled ‘A.I. Opportunities Action Plan’ which, among other things, will create dozens of so-called ‘A.I. Growth Zones’.

Planning laws will be bypassed in the name of massive data centre construction (one of which will be the biggest in Europe). The EU is moving in a similar direction with its A.I. Continent Action Plan.

All of these efforts are aligned around the rhetoric of ‘winning the A.I. race’ (the plan unveiled by the White House last week was explicitly named as such). But why does there even need to be an A.I. race? Why can’t the world just cooperate on these future-defining technologies?

The answer lies in how China has behaved when it comes to this kind of tech, and the campaign of widespread intellectual property and tech theft it has undertaken.

China denies this, but there is a great deal of documented evidence that it is happening in areas like A.I., electric vehicles, renewable energy, and the semiconductors that power them.

Although Western companies have been using patents to protect their tech in the West, Chinese courts have been lax about enforcing those rights in China, consistently favouring Chinese interests and effectively resulting in IP theft from the Western companies.

This kind of theft has three major consequences. The first is economic: a U.S. congressional estimate placed the cost of Chinese intellectual property infringement at 225–600 billion dollars yearly. It can also cause massive volatility, like we saw with the flash sell-off catalysed by the unveiling of Deepseek.

The second consequence is strategic. Put simply, theft allows China to rapidly and cheaply develop technology in critical areas. So the question becomes: what’s the point in innovating and pouring money into research & development when you can just steal the technology and catch up quickly that way instead?

But the third, and arguably the most important for the future of humanity, is trust. What China’s actions have done is rob the world of a collective effort to safely and humanely develop artificial intelligence. This in turn encourages recklessness, compromise, and further theft.

And now, as the US becomes more selective on who it provides its cutting-edge chips to, the UK has to think about its place in the race and how it can develop and safeguard A.I. of its own.

Although the UK has made some positive steps in this regard, the UK government has also found itself to be very reliant on the US, signing a commitment to partner with OpenAI for it to be used in our public services. That kind of reliance could prove dangerous if the US decides to start treating the UK more like a dependent state rather than a partner.

Beijing last week hosted a World A.I. Summit where the concept of ‘global A.I. governance’ will be discussed. It came 24 hours after diplomats from the EU travelled to Beijing for a summit to mark 50 years of relations with Europe. While China preaches cooperation in public, it picks pockets in secret.

With the race splintering further in an increasingly stratified global order, the UK can no longer rely solely on the US or the EU, and must go full steam ahead to build data centres, meet A.I.’s energy demands, and develop and protect its own A.I. technologies.

The race as it exists now was started by China and its behaviour on the international stage, and it's up to us now not to fall behind.

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Dominic Davies is an AI Legaltech Expert and CEO of patent-tech firm Lightbringer.

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