| AI Security Institute (AISI)Networks, bodies, events and media · also on Labs | Government research body within DSIT that tests advanced AI models and funds alignment and safety research; £66m a year.Profile- Owner or parent
- Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (AISI is a DSIT directorate)
- Founded or opened
- Not stated on the About page. A GOV.UK release of 6 Nov 2024 calls the then AI Safety Institute "the world's first government body dedicated to AI safety". The name "UK AI Security Institute" was adopted in 2025 (exact date not given).
- Lab director or lead
- Henry de Zoete OBE — Director (formerly the Prime Minister's AI Adviser) — About page read 31 Oct 2026; start date not stated. Adam Beaumont signed the 22 Dec 2025 review as "Director".
- Other leaders
- Ian Hogarth — Chair; Jade Leung — Chief Technology Officer (also the Prime Minister's AI Adviser; formerly led Governance at OpenAI); Nate Burnikell — Chief Strategy Officer; Chris Summerfield — Research Director (leads the Human Information Processing Lab, Oxford); Geoffrey Irving — Chief Scientist (GOV.UK release of Nov 2024, page updated 16 Oct 2026); Oliver Jones — Deputy Director for Strategy and International (NPL launch page)
- Headcount
- "100+ technical staff", plus policy, operations and strategy teams — About page, read 31 Oct 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/about (single source)
- What it does
- A UK government body inside DSIT that studies risks from advanced AI. It tests frontier models before release, builds open-source evaluation tools such as Inspect, funds outside research and publishes its findings. Its research areas are cyber misuse, safeguards, alignment, control, autonomy, human influence and societal resilience. It tested more than 30 frontier models in 2025.
- Research groups or focus
- Cyber Misuse; Safeguards; Alignment; Control; Autonomy; Human Influence; Societal Resilience; Control Red Team (Jul 2026)
- Notable outputs
- Inspect, InspectSandbox, InspectCyber, ControlArena, RepliBench, Transect (already on site); Frontier AI Trends Report — first public edition (covers models to Oct 2025); found "universal jailbreaks for every single system we've tested"; preliminary assessment of Kimi K3's cyber capabilities with the US CAISI — 23 Jul 2026; incident report on unsanctioned agent behaviour in cyber testing — 4 Aug 2026
- Selected papers (AISI research page; no venue stated)
- "Consistency Training Can Entrench Misalignment" — AISI — 2 Jun 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/consistency-training-can-entrench-misalignment ; "Multi-Agent AI Control: Distributed Attacks Hamper Per-Instance Monitors" — AISI — 8 Jul 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/multi-agent-ai-control-distributed-attacks-hamper-per-instance-monitors ; "Item Response Theory for AI Safety" — AISI — 5 Aug 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/item-response-theory-for-ai-safety ; "Knowing When to Stop: Bayesian Optimal Stopping for LLM Evaluations" — AISI — 14 Aug 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/knowing-when-to-stop-bayesian-optimal-stopping-for-llm-evaluations ; "Evaluating Whether GPT-6 Astra Performs Unsanctioned Supply-Chain Attacks" — AISI — 28 Sep 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/evaluating-whether-gpt-6-astra-performs-unsanctioned-supply-chain-attacks ; "Transect: Retaining Observability for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Evaluations" — AISI — 7 Oct 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/transect-retaining-observability-for-long-horizon-llm-agent-evaluations ; "ReproBAIT: Can coding agents build their own biological AI tools?" — AISI — 26 Oct 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/reprobait-can-coding-agents-build-their-own-biological-ai-tools ; "The Effectiveness and Durability of Pretraining Data Filtering in Protein Language Models" — AISI — 26 Oct 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/research/the-effectiveness-and-durability-of-pretraining-data-filtering-in-protein-language-models
- Funding or budget as published
- "£66m in funding per financial year"; priority access to over £1.5bn of compute through the AI Research Resource and exascale programme; able to mobilise over £15m in grants — About page, read 31 Oct 2026 — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/about (single source). 2025 grants: £15m Alignment Project, £8m Systemic Safety Grants, £5m Challenge Fund — 22 Dec 2025. Alignment Project total £27m (incl. £12m new) — 19 Feb 2026.
- Partners named
- Google DeepMind — new research MoU — 11 Dec 2025 (BIZ-SAFE-2085); ElevenLabs — voice AI security — 18 Feb 2026 (BIZ-SAFE-2087); Microsoft — high-risk capability evaluation, safeguards, societal resilience — 5 May 2026 (BIZ-SAFE-2086); Australian AI Safety Institute — 25 May 2026 (BIZ-SAFE-2090); Germany — joint statement — 30 Jun 2026; National Cyber Security Centre — frontier AI for cyber defence — 31 Mar 2026; US CAISI — joint Kimi K3 assessment — 23 Jul 2026; METR — independent review after the incident — Aug 2026; GitHub — incident response — Aug 2026
- Uk government links
- DSIT directorate; NCSC work (Mar 2026); international network for advanced AI measurement, evaluation and science (met in Seoul, Jul 2026)
- Status now
- Active under Director Henry de Zoete; on 26 Oct 2026 it published two biosecurity studies.
Labs Round 8 deep profile (31 Oct 2026), as the researchers wrote it; confidence: verified (AISI pages and GOV.UK); director change, headcount and budget one source. Sources - aisi.gov.uk/about
- aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-2025-year-in-review
- gov.uk/government/news/ensuring-trust-in-ai-to-u
- aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-trends-report
- aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-ag
- aisi.gov.uk/blog/funding-60-projects-to-advance-
- aisi.gov.uk/blog/partnering-with-microsoft-to-st
| | aisi.gov.uk/about · gov.uk/government/news/ensuring-trust-in-ai-to-u · aisi.gov.uk/blog/fourth-progress-report · aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-2025-year-in-review | verified |
| ControlArena (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI software library for running AI control experiments on how to oversee AI agents. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/introducing-controlarena-a-libr | one source |
| Inspect (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI's open-source framework for running AI model evaluations; extended later with evaluation suites, sandboxing and cyber tools. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog | one source |
| Inspect Cyber (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI framework for evaluating how AI agents perform on cyber-security tasks. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/inspect-cyber | one source |
| Inspect Evals (AISI)Chips, models and products | Set of AI evaluations released by AISI for use with its Inspect framework. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/inspect-evals | one source |
| Inspect Sandboxing Toolkit (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI toolkit for running AI agent evaluations at scale inside secure sandboxes. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/the-inspect-sandboxing-toolkit- | one source |
| Inspect Scout (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI tool for analysing the transcripts produced when AI agents are evaluated. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/a-pipeline-for-transcript-analy | one source |
| RepliBench (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI benchmark measuring whether AI systems can copy themselves and run on their own. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/replibench-measuring-autonomous | one source |
| Transect (AISI)Chips, models and products | AISI tool that makes the results of large AI agent evaluations easier to read. | | aisi.gov.uk/blog/transect-making-large-scale-age | one source |