UK minister: AI boost is £120B, £400B came from Google report

The UK's AI minister has told Parliament that AI adoption and data investment could add between £55 billion and £140 billion to the economy by 2030, with a central estimate of £120 billion. That is roughly a third of the £400 billion figure officials have repeated for almost two years. According to Wired, the higher number traces to a 2023 report commissioned by Google and written by the consultancy Public First, now known as PF Global.

Minister Kanishka Narayan called even his lower range "hugely uncertain." His written answer is, per Wired, "the first recorded evidence of the government placing the two figures side by side or saying the report had been commissioned by Google." He did not withdraw the £400 billion figure, or say it was wrong.

Asked about the gap, PF Global head of economics Jonathan Dupont told Wired it was partly due to what the firm considered the government's slow adoption of AI.

Two governments spent almost two years anchoring their AI pitch to a Google-commissioned number without naming its provenance. The admission lands in a busy run of UK and US regulation stories on our tracker this week.