Burnham appoints first AI minister to Cabinet in tech reshuffle

LONDON – Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has appointed Kanishka Narayan as minister for artificial intelligence, making the post a Cabinet-level position for the first time.

Burnham separately dissolved the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, or DSIT, and merged some of its functions with the Department for Business and Trade. He appointed Jonathan Reynolds as Secretary of State, overseeing the newly created Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.

Narayan’s brief spans the Cabinet Office and Reynolds’s department, according to a government statement. It’s not yet clear how the newly formed departments will handle policies in critical tech areas like data centers, technology procurement, copyright and semiconductors. A DSIT representative declined to comment; the Cabinet Office didn’t return a request for comment.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport will also expand under Lisa Nandy, overseeing some of the government digital work and tech regulation managed by DSIT.

The response to the restructure was mixed among U.K. entrepreneurs and investors, who worried about the dissolution of a department focused on their industry but heaped praise on Narayan, the junior minister for AI and online safety since late last year.

In that role, Narayan served under technology secretary Liz Kendall, who was ousted on Monday alongside several senior ministers who served under Starmer. He has announced millions of pounds in investment to U.K. semiconductor and AI startups and oversees the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, one of the first international organizations to test Anthropic PBC’s cutting-edge Mythos model.

Moving oversight of digital services to the culture department “feels like a return to the early 2000s, when technology was treated as a curious side interest rather than a core part of economic growth,” said Alexandru Voica, head of public affairs for Synthesia, a prominent AI startup based in London.

Startup Coalition, a London-based advocacy group, wrote a letter to Burnham over the weekend saying DSIT’s closure would shut the “single front door” the tech sector had to the government. “The abolition of DSIT is clearly a bad thing,” Dom Hallas, the organization’s executive director, said after Burnham’s changes. “But if anyone could make up for it in Cabinet, it would be Kanishka [Narayan], who knows startups and the ecosystem better than anyone in government.”

The U.K.’s position as a quantum computing cluster is also at risk after the restructure and resignation of science minister Patrick Vallance, said Dame Anne Glover, Chief Executive Officer of investment firm Amadeus Capital Partners. “All of that was very visible because of that department and in particular Patrick Vallance,” she said. Vallance resigned from DSIT on Monday, citing personal reasons.

Narayan’s elevation is a “reassuring counter-signal” to the DSIT closure, said Meryem Arik, co-founder of British AI startup Doubleword. He “is trusted in Whitehall and in industry alike as an operator who can actually get things done,” she added.

Britain isn’t the first G7 nation to appoint a high-level AI minister, with France and Canada establishing similar roles over the last two years.

“Nations have a narrow window to decide whether they shape AI or get shaped by it,” Narayan wrote on X after he was named to the Cabinet. “Britain is in that window right now.”

The U.K.’s artificial intelligence strategy is being watched closely beyond its borders. It is home to a swath of venture capitalists, prominent AI operators — including Google DeepMind and startups like ElevenLabs and Wayve — as well as a coveted engineering talent pool. After Brexit, the country tried positioning itself as a welcome hub for overseas tech investment, with a lighter regulatory touch than the European Union.

Still, Britain’s leaders have faced criticism for flip-flopping on tech initiatives and underinvesting in computing resources. Some marquee digital infrastructure projects, including a planned OpenAI data center, have been canceled or put on hold, in part because of the country’s high energy prices.

Burnham, who took over on Monday after Starmer resigned this summer, has said little about his AI and tech strategy. A critical area that DSIT had managed was copyright law. The country has abandoned setting new rules that would determine how companies training AI models could use protected material.

Burnham and Narayan will also be forced to take a position on the tech sovereignty debate in Europe. Officials in France and Germany want the continent to rely as little as possible on models and software from Silicon Valley, a call fueled by Washington’s willingness to cut off foreign access to cutting-edge models.

DSIT was formed in 2023 by Starmer’s predecessor, Conservative leader Rishi Sunak. The department has backed research programs in quantum computing and clean energy.

It also set up AI Growth Zones, designated areas for building data centers with approval processes and access to power. One of the first big projects — a campus from OpenAI and British cloud provider Nscale — hit a snag earlier this year after the ChatGPT creator pulled out, citing regulation and high energy costs.

At the time, Narayan pushed back on the idea that Britain’s rules and electricity prices would restrict large data centers.

The department oversaw the creation of the Sovereign AI Fund, a €500 million ($571 million) state-backed venture unit that has invested in a handful of British AI companies, including Ineffable Intelligence — a new AI model developer from a DeepMind alum — and Alphabet Inc.’s Isomorphic Labs.