The UK government has committed up to £60m to establish two new artificial intelligence research laboratories, led by the universities of Oxford and University College London, with the aim of advancing the fundamental science underpinning AI development.

The funding will be administered by UK Research and Innovation's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council over six years. Both laboratories will receive access to large-scale computing infrastructure as part of the package, which the government says is intended to lower the cost of AI and widen access to the technology across the public and private sectors.

The first laboratory, the Science of Fundamental AI Research, known as SOFAIR, will be led by David Barber at UCL in partnership with the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. Its work will focus on developing open-source AI technologies designed to run on widely available hardware rather than the specialised systems that currently place advanced AI beyond the reach of many organisations. Researchers will be drawn from computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience, reflecting an approach that treats AI development as a problem requiring contributions from multiple disciplines rather than a single field.

The second laboratory, the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab, or BOLD, will be led by Jakob Foerster at the University of Oxford, working alongside UCL and Imperial College London. Where SOFAIR is oriented towards the architecture of AI systems, BOLD is concerned with how those systems learn. The lab will develop AI that can adapt to unfamiliar situations, absorb new information more efficiently and operate in physical environments. The emphasis is on practical deployment, with the government citing workplaces, infrastructure and public services as areas where the research could find application.

Each laboratory will receive £2m specifically for doctoral recruitment, with a minimum of ten PhD students to be hired per lab. The investment signals an intention to build research capacity over the long term rather than produce immediate outputs. Both institutions will work alongside researchers at various career stages, though the doctoral funding represents the most concrete commitment to pipeline development announced alongside the broader package.

Charlotte Deane, senior responsible owner for the UKRI AI Programme and executive chair of EPSRC, said the UK possessed the necessary ingredients to compete at the frontier of AI research. "We are one of the few countries in the world with all the right ingredients, from a deep pool of top AI experts to world-class universities," she stated. "These labs will put that advantage to work, backing the bold, high-reward ideas that can shape the future of AI."

Rather than portraying the two laboratories as substitutes for what is currently in existence, the announcement places them inside a network of current research institutions. Both SOFAIR and BOLD will collaborate with the Alan Turing Institute and UKRI's AI research hubs, suggesting the government's intention is to extend the country's research infrastructure rather than consolidate it. The broader aim, as stated by UKRI, is to make advanced AI tools cheaper and more widely usable, with the expectation that progress at the level of fundamental research will eventually translate into reduced costs and broader adoption across the economy.