Partner @Balderton. Investing in AI, health and energy. Chair of UK Sovereign AI. Author of Start-Up Century. Mostly Generative.

Joined March 2010
92 Photos and videos
Another reminder of just how critical sovereign AI capabilities are. As an aside, @UKSovereignAI is hiring: sovereignai.gov.uk/about
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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James Wise retweeted
I get asked often: "AISI's evals show models getting rapidly better at cyber. But does that translate into the real-world capability?" So with government partners, we ran AI systems across real government code-bases. 407 findings, incl. multiple critical vulnerabilities. 🧵
Can frontier AI help defend government systems? AISI, the Government Cyber Coordination Centre, and @NCSC recently collaborated in a pilot to use frontier AI to strengthen cyber resilience across the UK public sector. You can read the results here: gov.uk/government/case-studi…
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James Wise retweeted
I was delighted to speak at the AI Summit during @LDNTechWeek today. AI has the capacity and capability to transform warfare. If we don’t make progress and recognise the profound effect AI will have on the business of war, we will lose and we won’t deter.   Read my speech 👇
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In the midst of an intense week in UK tech ( and globally ) it’s worth remembering that the Department for Technology in the UK (DSIT) didn’t exist just 3 years ago. At the start of ‘23, we didn’t have anyone in Cabinet whose sole role was to help Govt navigate what is now one of the most important opportunities and challenges facing the country. Perhaps because of the Dept’s leadership ( it’s not clear that @leicesterliz or @KanishkaNarayan have slept this week! ) and it’s willingness to experiment with new approaches like ARIA, Sovereign AI and AISI, it’s been one of the most impactful and creative arms of Govt in recent years. At a much needed time. Yes, the areas for improvement are endless. But institutional reform is probably the area of biggest delta in votes to impact ( no votes in it, huge impact if it works ). Credit to @RishiSunak and everyone involved in creating this Dept. I think everyone involved in UK tech week hopes the trajectory continues.
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James Wise retweeted
We're doubling compute access for the UK's most ambitious AI startups. The response since launch has been remarkable. In just three months, we have received more than 200 applications requesting over 67 million GPU hours. Founders here are building frontier AI models, scientific discovery platforms, next-generation compute infrastructure, cybersecurity technologies, drug discovery tools, and other innovations with the potential to shape the next decade of economic growth and national capability. If Britain wants to be an AI maker, not an AI taker, we need to back our most promising startups with the compute they need to build at the frontier. Today's announcement at @LDNTechWeek does exactly that.
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James Wise retweeted
A London startup called Cosine is building what it calls Britain's first sovereign frontier AI model. The model is called Lumen Sovereign. An AI you can run entirely inside your own walls.You dont' need external data transfer,foreign managed servers and code leaving the building.For banks, hospitals and defence primes,thats the only version that's legally allowed in the room. The UK government chose @CosineAI as a first partner in its £500 million Sovereign AI programme after the company's models outperformed OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and DeepSeek on independent coding benchmarks for two straight years. They were handed 500,000 GPU hours on Isambard AI, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. Cosine is already working across UK defence primes and critical infrastructure including organisations tied to the UK's nuclear deterrent. Congratulations to @yangli_ , @AlistairPullen , @SamOfStenner n all the team members of Cosine
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James Wise retweeted
British startups to “scale here” and “stay here”, as UK PM unveils £400M chip plan tech.eu/2026/06/08/british-s…
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As well as incredible examples of entrepreneurship and innovation, it's worth remembering that the US Government was the first customer of both SpaceX and Palantir ( and in Palantir's case, one of the first investors too ). Both have been hugely positive for the US economy and their geopolitical position. There will be many positive announcements this week from my colleagues at DSIT on backing British AI start-ups, so it's worth remembering the size of the prize if we get it right. Government procurement isn't about picking winners, but supporting innovation and providing better public services. But back when SpaceX and Palantir were starting up and getting US Govt support - the UK couldn't have procured from a local start-up ( EU frameworks would have prevented them ) and even if we wanted too, the Govt didn't prioritise working with new technologies - but went with 'safe bets' with legacy companies for institutions like the NHS and Post Office....look where that got us. Thankfully, if belatedly, with the introduction of the BBB, NSSIF & the Procurement Act under the Conservatives, and expansion of the BBB and set-up of SovAI under this Government, I'm much more positive about our ability to start and scale similarly important, international winners going forward.
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James Wise retweeted
🚨New analysis from us @BCG CfG 🚨 Ahead of today's UK AI Adoption Summit, we have looked at the potential productivity & economic gains from AI adoption in the UK. There is significant potential, up to £1 trillion added to the UK economy over 10 years. But it depends on the right kind of adoption. This means deep adoption & integration of more sophisticated AI tools, not just bolting on off the shelf tools. 🧵on our key findings & new insights (from part 1 of our work, with part 2 to follow later in summer) 1/
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James Wise retweeted
Former (Conservative) Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praises (Labour) Government’s awesome SovAI unit. UK’s AI work remains one of the few ongoing areas of senior cross party agreement in British politics.
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We’ve had an astonishing 338 British AI companies apply for our first ‘strategic assets’ programme at SovAI. We aim to support a handful with multi-£M offers to build essential infrastructure here in areas like advanced wet-labs. The team are working through it all - but as they say - we’re going to need a bigger boat!
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James Wise retweeted
A team at Oxford built a search engine for every drug the NHS prescribes, and it has quietly saved the health service millions. It's called OpenPrescribing. The NHS publishes its full prescribing dataset every month. It's 700 million rows of raw numbers nobody could actually read. So Oxford built a tool that turns it into live charts in seconds. You type a drug name. It shows you which practices over-prescribe it, which regions are slow to follow new guidelines, and where the money is being wasted. → Search any drug across any GP practice in England → Find safety and cost outliers instantly → 70 ready-made quality measures → Updates monthly, automatically → Free, open source, MIT licensed 20,000 people use it every month. Doctors. Researchers. Journalists. Public data that sat unreadable for years is now one search away. openprescribing.net/analyse/
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There are already 19,780 jobs live on the free jobs portal we just launched for start-ups based in the UK & Europe! There's no doubt AI is creating more jobs, but they will be different. In the era of the PC, and the internet, it was the people who jumped in and worked out how to get the best from these new technologies that benefitted the most - the same will be true in the AI era ( of people, as well as countries ). So do check out some of the roles in these mostly AI-first companies, great places to get experience or build an entrepreneurial career.
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James Wise retweeted
.@satyanadella just put the whole "water" debate to rest. Datacenters run on a closed loop cooling system, the water usage of a datacenter for an entire year is roughly equivalent to a usage of 1 restaurant!
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James Wise retweeted
We believe AI can be a dedicated research partner to help discover the next breakthrough. Enter Co-Scientist: our latest Gemini-based multi-agent system that can generate, debate and evolve novel hypotheses for complex scientific problems 🧵
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