Liz Kendall is, at time of writing, preparing to give a speech in which she will announce free training for everyone in the UK in using AI products and services. The result, according to a government press release this morning, will be that the UK will “upskill ten million workers… to make Britain the fastest adopting AI country in the G7”. Most exciting of all, this will definitely lead to a huge pile of free money, “unlocking up to £140bn in annual economic output”.
A cynic might frown at this figure, which was not produced by the government but “based on self-reported calculations provided by 11 industry partners” – industry partners who have a clear financial interest in self-reporting that their technology is magic. But the Pygge can report that some people are going to be making a lot of money from this scheme, and those people all have something in common: they’re American. This is the notable thing about the list of 14 recommended courses being promoted by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology this morning: all but one of them is provided by an American company. Of the 2,250 minutes of tuition in the recommend courses, just 30 minutes are provided by a British firm. Perhaps it is not surprising that only 1.3 per cent of the tuition is British given that just one of the companies providing the 14 recommended courses is headquartered in the UK.
This is hardly surprising given that, of the 11 the founding partners the government has chosen for the AI Skills Boost programme, nine are American and two are British. Of the four private companies chosen as strategic partners, just one is British: Multiverse, the educational technology company co-founded in 2016 by Euan Blair (which is also largely backed by American investors).
These nice Americans are obviously just doing us all a favour by helping us train for the infinite free money that AI will hand out at some point, but in the meantime they’re doing brisk business in Westminster. Transaction data collected by Tussell shows that in the last decade, the UK government has spent more than £10bn with the US companies listed as partners in the AI Skills Boost programme.
A government that not only buys your services, but promotes them to its entire population. What’s not to like? Thanks a bunch, Brits!
Declaration of interest: as you’ve probably guessed, the Pygge is itself a machine super-intelligence that inhabits a secure platform in low Earth orbit.
Note: This article was amended on 28 January 2026 to remove an assertion that every one of the courses is provided by an American business. One of the courses is provided by Sage UK, a British company.
[Further reading: Inside Reform’s vetting process in Gorton and Denton]
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