Intelligence Archive

Sixteen parliamentary questions spanning January 2025 to January 2026 reveal a government confident in its AI infrastructure narrative but noticeably reticent on measurable delivery milestones. The AI Growth Zones programme — the centrepiece of the AI Opportunities Action Plan — has progressed from expression of interest to formal application, yet ministerial responses remain dominated by aspiration rather than verified outcome. The gap between the rhetoric of global leadership and the reality of confirmed, operational infrastructure is the defining feature of this parliamentary period.

Analysis of 50 parliamentary written questions and ministerial responses spanning January 2025 to February 2026 reveals a consistent pattern of formulaic responses to AI governance questions, with ministerial accountability frequently substituted by reference to the AI Action Plan as a rhetorical anchor. Concrete implementation evidence is strongest in departmental delivery contexts — particularly the Ministry of Justice — but weakest precisely where parliamentary scrutiny is most pointed: on legislation, timelines, and regulatory architecture.

Thirty-seven parliamentary questions spanning a decade reveal a consistent pattern: the UK government acknowledges deep structural dependency on two dominant US cloud providers, yet repeatedly defers substantive action to an independent regulator it declines to direct. Ministerial responses confirm that central government holds no consolidated data on cloud dependency across critical public services or critical national infrastructure, whilst simultaneously committing to diversification measures whose delivery timelines remain opaque.

A synthesis of 41 parliamentary questions spanning 2018 to 2026 reveals a consistent pattern in which the UK Government has deepened its structural dependency on Amazon Web Services across critical public sector infrastructure whilst simultaneously demonstrating limited visibility of the scale, cost, and risk of that dependency. The October 2025 AWS outage — which disrupted the Home Office, DVLA, DWP and HMRC — exposed the practical consequences of this posture. Ministerial responses throughout the period exhibit a recurring tendency to defer accountability either to the CMA's regulatory independence or to future legislative instruments, whilst providing minimal substantive commitment to remediation.

A five-year parliamentary record on UK compute infrastructure reveals a persistent pattern of ambitious commitments, missed milestones, and recycled assurances. The 2021 pledge to deploy an exascale supercomputer by 2025 was quietly abandoned without parliamentary acknowledgement, replaced by successively reframed targets. Ministerial responses across successive governments demonstrate institutional continuity in aspiration but chronic weakness in delivery accountability.

If you've been following tech news recently, you've likely encountered something rather unsettling: MoltBook, a social network where AI agents chat amongst themselves whilst humans can only watch from the sidelines

Recent industry discourse reveals a fundamental coordination failure within organisations developing AI frameworks: the systematic separation of AI governance from AI policy functions