Evie Breese is a UK Reporting Fellow at Tech Policy Press and openDemocracy.Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham gestures as he speaks next to British AI Minister Kanishka Narayan during a business and investor roundtable before attending the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York City, Tuesday Sept. 22, 2026. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)Andy Burnham, the nascent United Kingdom prime minister, has in recent weeks sought to position the UK as a global leader in AI safety. At his first party conference as Labour leader, Burnham said that he will use the UK’s G20 Presidency next year to put AI “center stage,” followed by the development of a “new global code to capture its benefits whilst being clear-eyed about its risks.”Also attending the Labour Party conference last month — his first as a member of the Cabinet — AI Minister Kanishka Narayan made the somewhat surprising pronouncement that the UK has already effectively banned superintelligence. This would be a world first, given that no country currently has superintelligence-specific laws (though proposals have been put forward in the UK, EU and the United States).Narayan explained that the UK does not have the physical infrastructure, such as energy or data center capabilities, “to build superintelligence in this country,” and besides, copyright laws make it illegal. “...It is currently illegal to develop a frontier large language model based on the transformer architecture, given the copyright position that…

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