Cabinet Office
UK department coordinating Whitehall delivery; now co-hosts the AI brief via Minister Kanishka Narayan.
The Cabinet Office picked up a standing seat in AI policy on 20 July 2026, when DSIT's abolition split its remit three ways; a 27 July fact sheet named no accounting officer for the sovereign AI programmes it now co-hosts.
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The Cabinet Office is a central UK Government department with a statutory role in coordinating policy delivery across Whitehall and supporting the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. It traces its origins to 1916, when a formal Cabinet Secretariat was established to record government decisions and coordinate wartime administration; the Minister for the Cabinet Office holds Cabinet rank, while day-to-day management falls to the Cabinet Secretary, the UK's most senior civil servant.
Its core functions span the Civil Service, the Government Digital Service, constitutional and devolution questions, national security coordination and public sector reform. It also acts as the cross-government enabler for programmes that need several departments to move in parallel, such as the procurement frameworks used by bodies like the National Space Operations Centre.
AI strategy moves in without an owner
The Cabinet Office's machinery-of-government fact sheet of 27 July 2026 placed AI strategy, public sector AI adoption and the AI Security Institute inside the Cabinet Office following DSIT's abolition on 20 July, but named no accounting officer for the sovereign AI programmes it now co-hosts. Kanishka Narayan kept the AI brief as Minister of state for Artificial Intelligence, sitting jointly across the Cabinet Office and the renamed Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
Rather than one successor department inheriting DSIT's AI REMIT whole, the brief split, giving the Cabinet Office a durable coordination function in AI policy it did not previously hold in its own right, but without the clear accountability line a single sponsoring department would have provided.
Reference
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