A cluster of US AI giants—Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic—has turned London’s King’s Cross into Europe’s densest AI district, much of it traceable to DeepMind staying in the city after its 2014 Google sale. Washington’s abrupt order barring foreign nationals from Anthropic’s latest models has revived a decade-old argument over UK “AI sovereignty”. Ministers are backing a spread of smaller bets—a £500m Sovereign AI fund and up to £60m for Oxford and UCL labs—rather than a homegrown frontier model. With barely 90 minutes’ notice, the US Department of Commerce told Anthropic to stop any foreign nationals using its frontier models, Fable and Mythos. The episode pushed sovereignty onto the agenda at this month’s G7. Of the $55bn raised worldwide by DeepMind alumni, only around $5bn has landed in Britain. AI minister Kanishka Narayan is sticking with a portfolio: the £500m Sovereign AI fund, £120m in grants, and up to £60m for “blue sky” labs at Oxford and UCL. One contender, Cosine, is using Bristol’s £225m Isambard-AI supercomputer to train what it claims will be Britain’s first sovereign frontier model by year-end.