Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader, has told the New Statesman he does not regret allowing Britain’s leading AI company to be sold into foreign ownership, and that he is “delighted” at the prospect of millions of children around the world being taught using AI.
Clegg has worked in the technology industry for most of his post-political career; after resigning as Liberal Democrat leader following the 2015 general election, he became Facebook’s most senior lobbyist from 2018 to 2025. He has recently joined the board of two AI-related technology companies, the AI education company Efekta and the datacentre provider Nscale, as a director. This week he said he has become “somewhat radicalised” by his experiences in Silicon Valley into believing Europe must “get its act together”, because the UK and Europe have “a level of dependence” on American technology that “is not compatible with the kind of agency and basic sovereignty that a country like ours should aspire to.”
The UK’s agency in AI would be much greater if one of the most advanced AI research in Britain (and arguably the world), DeepMind, had not been sold into American ownership in 2014, when it was bought by Google – a sale which happened when Clegg was in government, and to which neither he nor his Lib Dem business secretary, Vince Cable, raised any objection. When he was pressed by the New Statesman to say if he regretted allowing some of the world’s most valuable intellectual property to be sold into the hands of a foreign power, he said: “No. My answer is no.”
Clegg said he respected the decision of Demis Hassabis and his co-founders to sell their company to the US, and he recognised that the United States had offered the quickest way for them to secure the computing power and capital need to develop their technology. He said it was “fantastic” that DeepMind remained headquartered in the UK, which he said meant the “intellectual capital” of the company was being kept in London (the intellectual property of the company is owned by Alphabet Inc, of California). It was, he said, inevitable that “British companies, spun out of great minds and great universities, great research and engineering… finding market scale and finding capital elsewhere. And I think we should just be proud of that.”
In any case, he observed, Britain had missed the boat on building a foundational AI model – the technology that enables all AI applications – because “energy’s too expensive” (Clegg famously opposed the building of nuclear power stations in 2010 because they wouldn’t provide energy until 2022). This is also because the government had sided with British musicians, artists and publishers who want to keep their intellectual property, rather than American companies who want to take it without paying to train AI models.
It was necessary, Clegg said, to “grow up about what we mean by being completely British” in terms of technological sovereignty. This is reflected in the two UK-headquartered companies he joined this year: Efekta, the educational AI company Clegg said he is “delighted” to be on the advisory board of, is ultimately owned and controlled by EF L3 Group AG, of Switzerland. Nscale, the other AI-related company Clegg has joined as a director, is ultimately owned by Arkon Energy Pty Ltd, of Australia.
Efekta is a technological “spin-out” from EF, the world’s largest private education company, which has 52,000 employees in 114 countries. Efekta’s AI teaching platform is currently used by more than 4.5 million students, mostly of high-school age, in emerging markets such as Brazil and Rwanda.
Florence Nightingale is reported to have said: “Give me the schools of a country and I care not who makes its laws”. Stalin described education as “a weapon, the effects of which depend on who is holding it”. But Clegg said that while recognised that politicians “want to see their views and their worldview reflected in the classroom”, he did not see any new political significance in the deployment of a technology which can be imbued with political ideals becoming a teacher or teaching assistant to millions of children around the world. “I don’t think it’s the technology that changes that dynamic,” he said.
Efekta’s technology is sold to governments, which have their own priorities for education. China, for example, requires all education to be conduct in accordance with its policy of “patriotic education”. When the New Statesman asked Clegg if he had spoken to his new Efekta colleagues about what they would do when asked to comply with such policies, he said he had not. Efekta’s CEO, Stephen Hodges, told the New Statesman: “Those conversations have not come up.” Clegg said the conversations the company had were with local government and school boards, who were focused on improving results “that’s what’s driving their behaviour, not ideology”, he said.
It could be argued that Clegg, despite making his millions in a futuristic industry, is not the greatest judge of long-term consequences. His positions on university tuition fees and building (or rather, not building) nuclear power stations would become significant political issues a decade later. And here he is again, confident that the mass deployment of agentic AI systems in schools around the world can only be a good thing. In ten years’ time, we’ll know if he was right.
[Further reading: AI will dissolve civilisation as we know it]
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Subscribe here to commentElection result error in the article, Clegg kept his seat in 2015, only lost it in 2017.