UK government rollout of Humphrey AI tool raises fears about reliance on big tech | Artificial intelligence (AI)

The government’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool known as Humphrey is based on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, it can be revealed, raising questions about Whitehall’s increasing reliance on big tech.

Ministers have staked the future of civil service reform on rolling out AI across the public sector to improve efficiency, with all officials in England and Wales to receive training in the toolkit.

However, it is understood the government does not have overarching commercial agreements with the big tech companies on AI and uses a pay-as-you-go model through its existing cloud contracts, allowing it to swap through tools as they improve and become competitive.

Critics are concerned about the speed and scale of embedding AI from big tech into the heart of government, especially…