Kanishka Narayan

Kanishka Narayan, Labour MP for Vale of Glamorgan since July 2024, has served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology since September 2025. In May 2026 he became the focus of parliamentary scrutiny when the Commons SIT Committee's chair, Chi Onwurah, published their correspondence, in which she said his sovereignty letter 'fails to set out a coherent strategy for achieving technology sovereignty'. Narayan's response cited the £500m Sovereign AI Unit and a proposed advanced market commitment for AI hardware as the government's sovereign technology strategy.

Narayan was born in India in 1989 and moved to Cardiff at age 12, representing Wales' first ethnic minority MP. He attended Eton College on a scholarship, read PPE at Balliol College Oxford, and completed an MBA at Stanford. Before politics he worked as a civil servant in the Cabinet Office and the Environment Department, and in private-sector financial advisory roles.

The sovereignty strategy dispute positions Narayan as the minister responsible for defending the UK Government's AI industrial policy against accusations that it is fragmented and under-funded relative to EU and US commitments. His challenge is to articulate a coherent doctrine from a spending base that is smaller and a government structure that is more fragmented than its counterparts.