UK Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan joined the UK High Commissioner in India to discuss how the UK partners with India as part of the AI Impact Summit (Photo: UK High Commissioner to India)
OpenAI and Microsoft have formally joined the UK’s international coalition to safeguard the development of advanced artificial intelligence, pledging new funding to the AI Security Institute’s (AISI) flagship Alignment Project.
Announced at the AI Impact Summit in India by the Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, the move sees an additional £5.6 million from OpenAI alongside further support from Microsoft and other partners.
The new commitments mean more than £27 million is now available for AI alignment research, supporting around 60 projects across eight countries, with a second funding round due to open later this year.
The Government believes this initiative reinforces the UK’s ambition to remain at the forefront of frontier AI research while ensuring that safety, control and public trust remain central to deployment.
What Is AI Alignment – And Why It Matters
AI alignment refers to the challenge of ensuring that advanced AI systems act in accordance with human intentions, without unintended or harmful behaviour.
As models grow more capable and autonomous, the technical difficulty of keeping them reliable and controllable increases. Alignment research focuses on developing methods to prevent unsafe outcomes as AI systems are deployed in increasingly complex and open-ended environments.
Without continued progress in alignment, increasingly powerful AI systems could act in ways that are difficult to anticipate or govern – creating challenges not just for companies, but for regulators and governments worldwide.
The UK government has positioned alignment as essential to building public confidence in AI technologies that are already reshaping public services, reducing medical scan times, and driving productivity gains across sectors.
Ministerial Backing: “Safety Baked In from the Outset”
Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy emphasised that safety remains central to the UK’s AI strategy.
“AI offers us huge opportunities, but we will always be clear-eyed on the need to ensure safety is baked into it from the outset.”
He added that the UK has built “strong safety foundations” and said support from OpenAI and Microsoft would be “invaluable” in advancing that effort.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan framed trust as the defining challenge of AI adoption.
“We can only unlock the full power of AI if people trust it… alignment research tackles this head-on.”
Narayan described trust as “one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption”, arguing that the expanded funding will ensure AI delivers benefits “safely, confidently and for everyone”.
Welcoming the news, CEO of UKAI, the AI trade association in the UK, Tim Flagg said “This is a welcome and important step towards building trusted, secure AI systems, and it reinforces the UK’s leadership at the forefront of global AI safety and security. The Alignment Project shows how government, academia and industry – both major international firms and innovative UK businesses – can work together to set high standards that benefit everyone. With the right continued investment and collaboration, AI security can become a defining UK strength and a major export, positioning Britain as a trusted partner to countries around the world as they adopt AI safely and responsibly.”
OpenAI: No Single Organisation Can Solve Alignment Alone
For OpenAI, the decision to back the Alignment Project reflects a broader recognition that safety cannot be solved internally by any one firm.
Mia Glaese, Vice President of Research at OpenAI, said:
“As AI systems become more capable and more autonomous, alignment has to keep pace.”
She stressed that “the hardest problems won’t be solved by any one organisation working in isolation”, adding that independent research teams testing different approaches are essential to building a reliable and controllable AI ecosystem.
The company’s support for AISI complements its own internal alignment work, strengthening what it described as a broader research ecosystem focused on keeping advanced systems safe as they scale.
An Expanding International Coalition
Beyond OpenAI and Microsoft, the Alignment Project is supported by a wide international network, including:
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Anthropic
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
- Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)
The advisory board features leading global researchers including Yoshua Bengio, Zico Kolter, Shafi Goldwasser and Andrea Lincoln, alongside figures from academia and frontier AI labs.
The first 60 funded projects span eight countries, demonstrating the UK’s ambition to shape global standards rather than act alone.
Cementing the UK’s Leadership in Frontier AI
The Alignment Project combines grant funding, access to compute infrastructure and academic mentorship from AISI’s own scientists. The goal is to accelerate progress in alignment while ensuring researchers can test and evaluate increasingly powerful models responsibly.
As home to world-leading AI firms and four of the world’s top ten universities, the UK sees itself as uniquely placed to convene global partners around shared safety principles.
At a time when AI is rapidly being integrated into public services, defence, finance and healthcare, alignment is emerging as one of the defining technical and governance challenges of the decade.
The UK’s bet is that public confidence and global competitiveness are not in tension – but interdependent.
By securing backing from two of the world’s most influential AI companies, ministers are signalling that responsible innovation and national renewal can advance together.
Whether alignment research keeps pace with accelerating capability remains one of the most important questions facing the global AI community.