worked with Labour before the last general election.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nNow, documents obtained by openDemocracy offer a rare insight into how the firm courted a rapidly rising star in the civil service, and won special, undeclared access for its elite clientele to one of the most influential officials working on AI safety policy anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n
‘A fantastic discussion’<\/p>\n
Ilott\u2019s relationship with Hakluyt appears to have begun in October 2024, when Whitehall supremo Olly Robbins, then a partner at the company, invited him to have \u201cbreakfast or dinner with some senior clients\u201d \u2013 an invitation that Ilott said he\u2019d be \u201cvery happy\u201d to accept.<\/p>\n
Robbins had joined Hakluyt the year before, having previously held high-ranking positions across the civil service, including as the UK\u2019s deputy national security adviser and the chief Brexit negotiator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While there is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Robbins, the interaction reveals how elite advisory and lobbying firms leverage \u2018revolving door\u2019 hires from the civil service, who arrive with government contacts and operational knowledge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Hakluyt writes on its website: “Few other business models depend on human relationships as much as ours: this, above all, is what makes us different.”<\/p>\n
Hakluyt now counts a few dozen former elite public servants \u2013 from former cabinet secretaries to intelligence chiefs, and prime ministerial advisors \u2013 on its staff and advisory board. Within the relatively small world of Whitehall and Westminster politics, the prestige and influence of figures like this is hard to overstate.<\/p>\n
Before the meeting could be finalised, Robbins left Hakluyt to return to the civil service, taking up a position as head of the Foreign Office in January 2025. He was dismissed in a high-profile row earlier this year over his alleged role in the hiring of Peter Mandelson, a known friend of Jeffrey Epstein, as US ambassador.<\/p>\n
At the start of 2025, another Hakluyt executive picked up the email thread with Ilott.<\/p>\n
\u201cApologies for the delay in coming back to you,\u201d the company\u2019s staffer wrote. \u201cAs I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve seen, Olly has been appointed as the new [redacted] which is fantastic news, and we\u2019re very happy for him!\u201d<\/p>\n
Arrangements were then made for Ilott to attend a breakfast roundtable event at Hakluyt\u2019s Mayfair townhouse at 8:30am on 10 April \u2013 dress code: \u201cbusiness attire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A partially redacted attendee list, which was sent to Ilott ahead of time and released to openDemocracy under the FOI Act, offers a rare insight into Hakluyt\u2019s usually closely guarded client list.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It reveals that, as well as Microsoft and the Ellison Institute, those invited included BT, the UAE\u2019s state-owned wealth fund Mubadala, Silicon Valley private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Insight Partners, and an executive representing both the edutech platform Kahoot and energy cloud platform Kraken.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A representative from Calypso AI, a security software developer that Hakluyt invested in through its fund in 2023, was also on the invite list. Calypso AI was acquired by US tech giant F5 in September last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In response to an FOI request from openDemocracy, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: \u201cWe do not hold minutes, presentation materials or notes of the discussion. Additionally, we can confirm that Oliver Ilott undertook a speaking part during the event, however no speaking notes exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
The department initially refused to reveal which companies had been invited to the meeting, but eventually agreed to release the attendee list after we requested an internal review of its decision.<\/p>\n
After the breakfast roundtable, the advisory firm offered to send Ilott a gift by way of a thank you, according to correspondence obtained by openDemocracy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you so much again for your time today, and for sharing all your thoughts and views so generously. It was a fantastic discussion, and all our guests have said how much they enjoyed hearing from you, so thank you!\u201d a Hakluyt staffer wrote to Ilott.<\/p>\n
\u201cMight I be able to get your address? Just so we can send a little something to say thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n
openDemocracy understands Ilott did not accept the gift.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked what they intended to send, Haklut declined to comment. A spokesperson told openDemocracy: \u201cIt is customary for government officials and businesses to meet to discuss mutually relevant issues, as happened in this instance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018An informal meeting\u2019<\/p>\n
In September, five months after the breakfast meeting, Ilott met with Hakluyt again. By then, he had been promoted to interim director general of AI at the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology, a position that was later made permanent.<\/p>\n
While the government did declare this meeting \u2013 listing it as \u201cstakeholder engagement\u201d \u2013 it did not publish or record any details such as attendees, agenda, minutes or other notes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an informal meeting between Oliver Ilott and Hakluyt at Hakluyt Capital Limited\u2019s address in London, and there were no papers or agenda created in relation to the meeting,\u201d DSIT told openDemocracy in response to an FOI request.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the days after this meeting, a Hakluyt staffer sent an email connecting Ilott to an organiser of the Reagan-Jackson Security Dialogue, an annual conference co-hosted by the US-based Ronald Reagan Society and the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) in the UK.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the emails have been heavily redacted by DSIT, including to remove the senders\u2019 identities, it is likely the organiser was a staffer at HJS, a national security think tank that strongly supports US foreign policy in the Middle East. Its executive director is Reform\u2019s chief adviser on global affairs, having defected from the Conservatives last year.<\/p>\n
HJS does not declare its funders, but is a registered charity that files accounts with the Charity Commission. These show it received donations worth \u00a31.2m last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite the redactions, Ilott\u2019s response sheds some light on the nature of the communications.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHello, [redacted] thanks very much for the introduction and for the kind words,\u201d he wrote. \u201c[Redacted], it\u2019s great to be introduced. Sounds like you\u2019re doing really interesting work. I\u2019d be keen to help if I can.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the last two years, I\u2019ve been running the AI Security Institute. We combine private sector AI expertise with Government knowledge of national security risks, producing insights into the potential malicious uses of today\u2019s most powerful AI systems.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs [redacted says] I\u2019ve recently stepped up to cover the opportunities side of AI, as well as the risks,\u201d Ilott added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The respondent said they \u201clook forward to getting deeper on your work with the AI Security Institute and to being in touch soon about our events in London\u201d. They followed up days later, inviting Ilott to the security summit, which they described as \u201ca deeply substantive gathering of government officials \/ legislators from the UK and USA\u201d.<\/p>\n
DSIT told openDemocracy that Ilott did not attend the event.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A government spokesperson told openDemocracy: \u201cSenior government officials routinely meet with stakeholders relevant to their work as part of their regular duties. As is always the case, these meetings are declared through the usual transparency processes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, the April 2025 roundtable event was declared only after openDemocracy\u2019s FOI requests, 11 months after it took place, and the declaration does not mention the presence of any of Hakluyt\u2019s clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The chair of Andy Burnham\u2019s new AI Taskforce gave a secret private briefing to the Big Tech clients…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-738544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}