Strengthening our partnership with the UK government to support prosperity and security in the AI era

AI presents an opportunity to build a more prosperous and secure world.

The UK has already laid a strong foundation to seize this moment and is uniquely positioned to translate AI innovation into public benefit. That’s why we are excited to deepen our collaboration with the UK government to accelerate this work and offer a blueprint for other countries.

Together we will focus on using AI to speed up progress in science and education, modernize public services and advance national security and resilience.

Accelerating access to frontier AI in key sectors: Science & Education

Our partnership will center on providing access to frontier AI in two areas foundational to the UK’s long-term success: scientific discovery and education.

The UK has a rich history of applying new technologies to drive scientific progress, from Hooke’s microscope to Faraday’s electrical experiments. We aim to build on this heritage, and empower the next generation of scientists with AI tools that can unlock breakthroughs, transform the economy, and solve some of the major challenges facing humanity. We will provide priority access to our “AI for Science” models to UK scientists, including:

• AlphaEvolve - a Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms
• AlphaGenome - an AI model to help scientists better understand our DNA
• AI co-scientist - a multi-agent AI system that acts as a virtual scientific collaborator
• WeatherNext - a family of state-of-the-art weather forecasting models

Like the microscope or telescope, these AI tools are designed to enhance scientific capacity, enabling researchers to tackle problems of unprecedented complexity and scale. For example, AlphaFold - our AI system for predicting protein structures - has already enabled almost 190,000 researchers in the UK alone to deepen their understanding of areas such as crop resilience, antimicrobial resistance and other critical biological challenges.

Establishing Google DeepMind’s first automated science laboratory in the UK

To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.

Discovering new materials is one of the most important pursuits in science, offering the potential to reduce costs and enable entirely new technologies. For example, superconductors that operate at ambient temperature and pressure could allow for low cost medical imaging and reduce power loss in electrical grids. Other novel materials could help us tackle critical energy challenges by unlocking advanced batteries, next-generation solar cells and more efficient computer chips.

Enhancing teaching and learning

AI can augment the classroom experience, especially when grounded in learning science.

This impact was made clear in a successful pilot program in Northern Ireland, where Gemini helped save teachers an average of 10 hours per week by streamlining administrative work and brainstorming engaging lesson content. Beyond time savings, Eedi's recent exploratory randomized controlled trial (RCT) with UK students indicates that teachers who use AI tools slightly outperform teachers who do not as those students were 5.5 percentage points more likely to solve novel problems on subsequent topics.

To help scale this impact further across the UK, we are supporting research to understand how AI tools impact teaching and learning through a rigorous scientific approach, and exploring how to tailor our Gemini model - leveraging our longstanding commitment to pedagogy, including our LearnLM efforts - to complement England’s national curriculum. Our goal is to deliver state of the art educational experiences while also helping reduce educator workloads, freeing them to reclaim more time to focus on what they do best: helping every learner thrive.

Modernizing public services

AI also has tremendous potential to help build more effective and efficient public services. We are working directly with government teams to ensure they have the technical expertise and access to frontier models required to reimagine these services to better serve citizens. The UK Government’s AI Incubator team (i.AI) is currently trialling Extract - a tool for council planners that uses Gemini to transform old planning documents into clear, digital data. Currently, converting a single planning document takes up to 2 hours. Extract will transform these into digital data in just 40 seconds, significantly speeding up decision-making timelines.

Advancing national security and resilience

Our partnership will involve deeper collaboration with the UK AI Security Institute on critical safety research in explainability, alignment and societal impact, so these risks may be better understood and mitigated. Read more about this work here.

AI can also be a powerful defender against security risks. We will work with the UK government to advance AI-enhanced approaches to national cyber resilience, exploring using tools like Big Sleep and CodeMender to identify vulnerabilities and automatically fix code, enabling a more secure future.

National partnerships on AI

We believe AI will be humanity's most transformational technology, and we are committed to partnering with governments globally to turn its potential into real progress for people everywhere. By building on our collaboration with the UK government and important initiatives like the US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal, we aim to advance innovation, scientific discovery, and security for all.