Barclays has issued a "critical" announcement that could transform the country's relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). The bank, which has branches in Birmingham, has invested in CommonAI to fuel further growth of its AI engineering platform.
Strengthening UK AI Capabilities
The investment supports the growth of the UK's AI capabilities, focusing on developing trusted, domestic AI infrastructure. CommonAI will launch a programme centred on High Assurance, creating AI systems for highly regulated and essential environments such as financial services.
CommonAI aims to close the scale and knowledge gap in AI development that often holds back startups and small businesses from competing globally. It provides access to models, training data, hardware design, and affordable compute power, empowering organisations to build business-specific AI solutions safely without prohibitive development costs.
Industry and Government Support
Kristen Bennie, Group Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Barclays, said: "Artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses operate and innovate. By supporting CommonAI, we are helping to build a more open and collaborative ecosystem that can accelerate the development and adoption of AI across the UK, allowing businesses of all sizes, including Barclays, to access the capabilities and expertise to innovate and compete globally."
Kanishka Narayan, Labour Party AI Minister, added: "For AI to drive growth, businesses need to trust the systems they are using, especially in high-stakes sectors like financial services. CommonAI is building trusted, home-grown AI infrastructure that gives UK startups and businesses of every size the tools to develop and deploy AI with confidence, helping unlock AI-powered growth that we all stand to benefit from."
Building Trusted AI Infrastructure
Amy Nauiokas, Founder and Group CEO of Anthemis and Director of CommonAI, commented: "Barclays' backing underscores the importance of building trusted UK AI infrastructure. As AI moves from experimentation into real-world deployment, the next phase of development will depend on building systems that can operate safely, reliably, and at scale across critical industries. CommonAI's focus on high assurance development will support exactly that, whilst helping create the conditions for the next generation of scalable, commercially viable AI companies to emerge, further supported by Anthemis' dedicated fund."
Gavin Ferris, CEO of CommonAI CIC, stated: "The UK has a major opportunity in AI, but that long-term leadership will depend on building sovereign capability to develop and deploy trusted systems domestically. Barclays' support reflects growing recognition that trusted UK AI capabilities will be critical to enabling adoption across regulated and mission-critical sectors. This comes following the launch of our Scaling Inference programme with ARIA to improve how AI systems run at scale in real-world data-centre environments."
