The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, chaired by Dame Chi Onwurah, published a report on 7 July finding the government has "no coherent strategic framework" for sovereign technology and warning that the UK "risks being cut off at whim" by foreign partners.1 The committee is the cross-party group of MPs that scrutinises UK technology policy, and this is the first UK legislative body to put an official record behind the sovereignty-gap thesis.
The committee named its trigger. In June the Trump administration ordered a bar on foreign access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, and Anthropic pulled them worldwide; the US Commerce Department partially lifted the restriction on 27 June. A British research user lost access to two frontier AI models overnight on a decision taken in Washington, and that is the dependency the report says has no strategy behind it.
The report answers ASML's silence from the opposite direction. Where the company stopped naming its exposure to Washington in the same fortnight, the committee named the country's exposure out loud. The market went quiet on the dependency exactly as the politicians put it on the record.
The report lands against the £1.1bn AI Hardware Plan the UK announced at London Tech Week in June. Its argument is that the money buys hardware without a strategy to keep access to the frontier models that hardware would run.
