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\t\t“I just feel like there’s a slightly dishonest debate in this country”: Clegg\t<\/p>\n\t\t\tFriday 24 April 2026 11:46 am\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t“I just feel like there’s a slightly dishonest debate in this country”: Clegg\t<\/p>\n
Nick Clegg has told City AM that the UK\u2019s AI sovereignty debate is \u201cslightly dishonest\u201d due to our \u201cmarginal relevance\u201d as a global tech player. The ex-president of global affairs at Meta also said that policy decisions taken in recent years have limited the role the UK can now play in the development of AI technology. <\/p>\n
The former deputy prime minister, who now sits on the board of infrastructure darling Nscale, argued that in the AI race we are far further behind than the government lets on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just feel like there\u2019s a slightly dishonest debate in this country\u201d, Clegg told City AM. \u201cNo one in their right mind would ever train an LLM foundation model in the UK. In fact no one does\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think given our relatively marginal relevance and importance as a country in this great battle between China and the US, we all have to slightly grow up about about what we mean about being completely British\u201d.<\/p>\n
Just days ago, the government launched <\/a>its \u00a3500m Sovereign AI venture fund, promising homegrown startups and early-stage investment, access to the country\u2019s supercomputers, as well as fast-track visas for research talent.<\/p>\n Tech secretary Liz Kendall dubbed it \u201cunlike anything government has ever done before\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019ve skipped it altogether\u2019<\/p>\n The reason the UK never built its own foundation models is, according to Clegg, a direct consequence of policy choices. Specifically, the decision to side with rights holders over AI developers on copyright.<\/p>\n \u201cEnergy is too expensive\u201d, he told City AM. \u201cThe IP copyright stuff \u2013 it\u2019s a perfectly logical decision for a government to side with content providers, whether its [the media], the publishers or whether its Elton John or Paul McCartney.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut if you do that\u201d, he added, \u201cyou\u2019re never going to attract foundation model LLM developers\u201d.<\/p>\n The result, according to Clegg, is a country that stumbled out of the AI industrial revolution before it began.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are now operating as a country without a single steam engine we can call our own\u201d, he told City AM. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re dependent on US tech \u2013 by accident or by design, we\u2019ve just skipped that altogether\u201d.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n \t\t\tEnergy crisis: Britain could be sitting on a second North Sea<\/a><\/p>\n He revealed he attempted to make the case directly to the prime minister and the chancellor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last time I ever spoke to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves about this a year ago, I tried, and I think I singularly failed to get them interested\u201d, he told City AM.<\/p>\n The broader sovereignty concern, he stressed, is real and serious, even if the current debate around it is confused: \u201cIt\u2019s an astonishing level of over-reliance on American tech\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s done. So we now need to decide what\u2019s next\u2019<\/p>\n Instead, Clegg\u2019s pitch is to lean into open source models, which can run on domestic infrastructure with no data link back to an American server.<\/p>\n \u201cThe leading open source models are now all Chinese,\u201d he said. \u201cI personally would not be particularly squeamish about using open source Chinese models.<\/p>\n \u201cThey might not in their crude state spit out a particularly coherent response about what happened in Tiananmen, but you could run them in a sovereign way, you can run them free, and you can customise them exactly as you want.\u201d<\/p>\n Clegg\u2019s longer-term optimism rests not on large language models but on what he believes comes next.<\/p>\n He is an investor in a post-LLM research lab being established in Paris by Yann LeCun, and recently joined the board of Nscale,<\/a> the British data centre developer valued at $14.6bn following a $2bn fundraise backed by Nvidia.<\/p>\n The company has pledged to build what it calls the largest UK sovereign AI data centre in Loughton, Essex.<\/p>\n His wager then is on so-called world models, which understand the physical world rather than processing language.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d use an LLM to talk to your domestic robot \u2013 you would never use it to get your robot to walk around the house, it would smash up the furniture\u201d, he told City AM.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n