The Case for a Public Mind
Does Britain need a chartered artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is hardening into national infrastructure, yet its foundations are being laid by a handful of private, transnational entities. They control the chips, the cloud, the data centres, and the code. In doing so, they increasingly determine the texture of our digital future: what gets built, who profits, and what happens when systems fail in ways that affect livelihoods, services, and trust.
Their incentives are not wicked, but they are partial. They prioritise speed, scale, and capture. The question facing the United Kingdom is not whether we will use these systems. That is already settled. The question is on what terms. Are we content to outsource a growing share of civic and economic decision-making to systems governed elsewhere, or do we have the imagination to build a public alternative designed for public value?
A century ago, Britain faced a similar dilemma. The arrival of the wireless presented a fracture in the established order. Broadcasting could have been abandoned to commercial competition, as in the United States, or recruited as a mouthpiece of the state, as in regimes that understood the political power of a mass medium. Britain chose a third way. Under Royal Charter, the BBC was established with duties that placed public purpose above profit and day-to-day political control. Its mission was not merely cultural. It was constitutional. It constrained a powerful new technology within an institutional shape that could be argued with, appealed against, and trusted.
Is it time to apply that template to the age of intelligence? Should Britain build a chartered public AI: a service independent of ministerial control, distinct from commercial imperatives, and bound by duties of transparency, accountability, and service?
A public service AI would not attempt to outspend Google or OpenAI on raw compute. Its advantage would lie elsewhere: in trust, provenance, and long-term stewardship. It would exist to answer a basic question that commercial systems have little reason to prioritise: is this correct, and can I verify it?
The flagship interface would be a national assistant: a privacy-first, universally accessible tool designed to reduce the cognitive burden of modern life. It could help a citizen navigate the thicket of public information, from local services and council processes to eligibility rules and appointment systems. Properly designed, it would not optimise for engagement. It would optimise for accuracy and completion. A commercial assistant is rewarded when you remain within the product. A public assistant would be rewarded when you can get on with your life.
This is not a minor distinction. In a society where bureaucracy grows by accretion, and where every process quietly assumes time, literacy, and stamina, the design of a “default helper” becomes a question of social justice.
The strongest argument for a public model lies in assets that only the UK possesses, and that cannot be replaced once surrendered. Consider health. The NHS holds one of the world’s richest longitudinal records of care, outcomes, and population health. The prevailing commercial dynamic is, at best, asymmetrical. Private firms seek access to public data to improve proprietary systems, then sell the resulting capabilities back to the state. A chartered service could offer a different settlement.
Using federated learning, models could be trained inside secure environments so that sensitive records do not leave NHS enclaves and only aggregated insights move. Done properly, this shifts the bargain. Value returns to patients and the service that generated it, rather than being extracted and repackaged elsewhere. The point is not to build a single omniscient health model. It is to establish a public-interest capability for research and tooling that is auditable, contestable, and governed.
The same logic applies to culture and language. The BBC archives, taken seriously, are not nostalgia. They are a record of dialect, argument, humour, and history. A public model trained on such material would not simply speak in a globally smoothed corporate idiom. It would carry the texture of the place it serves.
Critics will object that the state has no business competing in a thriving market. This is a misreading of AI economics. We are moving toward a rentier arrangement where access to general-purpose intelligence becomes a toll paid by everyone, including businesses that have no alternative.
In that world, the corner shop, the GP practice, the legal firm, the logistics start-up, and the manufacturer all face the same structural fact: essential cognitive capacity sits behind a subscription and an external governance regime. A chartered public AI could offer a sovereign baseline. Not as charity, but as infrastructure. It could provide stable, affordable access to core capabilities through a public interface and a well-governed API, allowing small and medium-sized enterprises to build without surrendering margins and strategic autonomy to a small number of hyperscalers.
Public AI is not an anti-business idea. It treats intelligence like the road network: a shared utility that allows private commerce to flow.
The immediate fear, and the correct one, is state capture. Any national AI project will raise the spectre of surveillance and coercion. Here the BBC analogy matters not only for what it enabled, but for what it constrained.
A chartered public AI would need hard limits, expressed in law and in governance design. There would be explicit prohibitions on use for policing, military targeting, and surveillance. There would be independent oversight, transparent reporting, and clear routes for challenge and redress. The service would publish its methods, document its limitations, commission independent audit, and report routinely on safety, bias, and errors in a way intelligible to citizens, not only specialists.
It must answer to a trust, not to a minister, and it must be protected from capture by commercial influence as well as political appetite.
How would we pay for it? The mechanism is already familiar: a modest, hypothecated public contribution, protected in law, with exemptions for the lowest incomes. The goal is not to create a luxury product. It is to ensure universal access to a trustworthy interface for the services and information that make modern life function.
The alternative is not a neutral market. The alternative is dependency. In the geopolitical contest of the 21st century, the American tendency is corporate extraction and the Chinese tendency is state control. A British model could demonstrate a third way: citizen-centric, charter-governed, and built for public value.
We have precedent. We have talent. We have public assets that, if governed properly, can be used without being surrendered. What we lack is the confidence to insist that the most powerful technology of our generation should be built for and owned by the people it serves.