James Wise: This is how Britain wins the AI race

James Wise: This is how Britain wins the AI race

From Anglofuturism by Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale

June 26, 2026 · 1h 24m · Episode 60

About this episode

James Wise discusses the challenges and strategies for Britain to succeed in the AI race.

Docking at the King Charles III Space Station this week is James Wise: partner at Balderton Capital, author of Startup Century , and now the chair of the government’s Sovereign AI unit — a man who has spent twelve years giving exceptional people money to build companies and has now taken a tour of duty to do something stranger, which is to make the British state behave a little more like an investor and a little less like a grant machine. Tom and Calum want to know the obvious thing first: inside government, is anyone freaking out enough about AI? The good news, James says, is that most people are freaking out less than he is. That “British calm” is reassuring in a crisis and maddening in a transformation, and the real task is not getting one department to understand AI but getting the idea to diffuse across the whole of Whitehall the way a technology diffuses across an economy. Direction of travel is good. “But it’s a vector. We probably need to increase the speed.” Sovereignty, James argues, is not autarky — it is leverage, and it comes in three levels. There is resilience, the floor, which simply means nobody can turn off your chips overnight: you don’t need British-only…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale

Guest: James Wise

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Balderton Capital, DeepMind, Alphabet

Books & works: Startup Century

Places: Britain, British, Whitehall, King Charles III Space Station

More episodes of Anglofuturism

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Anglofuturism podcast page.