The UK is putting £130 million into AI-powered cyber defense, part of a £600 million-plus AI package announced ahead of this week’s Budget, The Register reports.
Where the money goes
- £60M for a National Cyber Shield using agentic AI, including a £25M challenge fund for UK security firms and a sandbox to test autonomous security tools.
- £70M for a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre to hunt vulnerabilities across infrastructure.
It comes days after the PHP2Shell scare, where the NCSC worked with OpenAI on disclosure. The AI minister said AI had already found 500 previously unknown flaws across the public sector.
My take
Attackers are using AI, so defenders have to. The big open question is how much freedom those agents get on live systems.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
