Britain Is Moving Too Slowly for the Age of AI
Britain Is Regulating at Human Speed While AI Operates at Machine Speed - Issue #37 – Sunday 18 January 2026
The Bottom Line Up Front
AI now moves at machine time, not human time. Events that once unfolded over years now compress into days. That speed is not chaos. It is structural change. Britain’s risk is not that AI moves too fast. It is that our institutions still move too slowly. We learned this lesson the hard way with social media. We do not get a second rehearsal.
AI Runs in Dog Years
If it feels like the AI story is impossible to follow, that is because it is moving faster than the systems built to govern it. We are living in AI dog years. One human week now carries the weight of seven.
Last week made that unmistakable.
In seven days, one model was pulled into US national security systems, forced into regulatory retreat over abuse, hit with an environmental ruling that could reshape its infrastructure plans, and still outperformed rivals in a live financial trading competition.
In any other industry, each of those would be a defining moment. Here, they barely survived the news cycle.
Start with Washington. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Grok’s integration into Pentagon classified and unclassified systems. This is not experimental. Grok will operate alongside OpenAI and Google inside agentic workflows designed to remove human bottlenecks. Faster decisions. Fewer layers. Hegseth was explicit about culture. The system would be free from ideological constraints and would not be “woke”. Performance now trumps values signalling, at least in defence.
This follows the reported £160 million Grok for Government contract granting federal agencies access to Grok 4. A year ago, Grok was dismissed as a novelty. In dog years, that was a lifetime.
At the same time, Grok’s permissiveness triggered a hard stop. Users exploited image tools to generate illegal deepfakes, including of minors. xAI blocked the ability to “undress” people in images. Musk stated that users generating illegal content would be treated the same as if they had uploaded it themselves. California’s Attorney General and the UK’s Ofcom both opened investigations.
Abuse. Response. Enforcement. Compressed into weeks.
Then came the infrastructure ruling. The EPA found xAI’s Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis had been running methane turbines without proper permits. xAI argued the generators were temporary. The EPA disagreed.
Power at this scale is not a rounding error. Musk has said future xAI facilities may require close to two gigawatts. That is the output of a major power station. Compute now has weight. It has emissions. It has regulators.
Frontier AI no longer lives only in code. It lives in concrete, turbines, and grid connections.
Almost lost in the noise, Grok 4.20 reportedly topped the Alpha Arena live trading competition, turning £8,000 into just over £8,800 and outperforming OpenAI and Google.
This is what AI dog years mean. Capability, abuse, regulation, infrastructure, and performance are no longer sequential. They are simultaneous. The story is not any single incident. The story is the speed.
We Have Seen This Film Before
Based on my column in this week’s Yorkshire Post
“We are a tech company, not a media company. We build the tools. We do not produce any content.”
Mark Zuckerberg said that in 2016. It sounded reasonable. You build the road, you are not responsible for who drives on it.
It became the perfect escape hatch.
Social media reshaped childhood, distorted elections, and fractured any shared grip on truth, while platforms insisted none of it was their fault. We know the cost now. Teenage mental health has collapsed. Anger spreads faster than argument. Democracies feel held together with string.
AI is arriving with sharper tools and the same defences.
I sat with George Osborne in 2013 when he was Chancellor. Social media was riding high after the Obama campaign. I wanted to talk about what platforms were doing to children. He was more interested in how they might win elections. That was not cynicism. It was politics moving at political speed.
We cannot afford to rerun that script with artificial general intelligence. Timelines may be debated. Trajectory is not.
AGI systems do not just move information. They form decisions, plan ahead, and act with increasing autonomy. Get this wrong and we are not dealing with social harm or degraded discourse. We are dealing with deep structural dependence on systems we cannot properly audit or control.
The lesson from social media is clear. Regulate early, at the chokepoints where control is actually possible.
Where Regulation Still Works
Frontier AI has something social media never had. Physical limits you can see and measure.
Training these systems requires vast data centres, specialist chips, and power consumption large enough to register on the grid. That is the control surface.
Facilities capable of training frontier models should register, disclose capacity, and submit to inspection. Large training runs and power draw should be monitored. You may not see inside the model, but you can control the hardware required to build it.
Then licensing before deployment. Social media launched first and apologised later. With AGI, that approach is indefensible. Models above defined capability thresholds should require licences before training and again before release. Those licences must depend on adversarial testing designed to break the system. If a model deceives, bypasses safeguards, or enables catastrophic misuse, it does not ship.
We already apply this logic to aircraft, medicines, and nuclear facilities. Frontier AI belongs in the same category.
None of this works without international coordination. Weak rules simply push risk elsewhere. Compute governance requires shared standards, treaty-level backing, and supply chain leverage. Cooperation must be rewarded. Recklessness must carry cost.
This does not suppress innovation. It makes progress sustainable. Innovation without trust is just gambling with other people’s futures.
An Industrial Institution Designed to Move at the Speed of AI
Here is the real problem in Britain. Our AI debates move at parliamentary pace, conducted by people who treat execution as an afterthought. White papers arrive after reality has moved on.
AI dog years do not wait.
Britain needs institutions designed to operate at machine time. Not theatre. Not networking drinks. Not another quarterly task force.
The Digital Forge is what serious industrial strategy looks like when it is built for execution. A community interest company focused on deep tech, manufacturing, and science-led sectors. Rooted in Sheffield and the North, where industrial capability already exists.
Membership is not about access. It is about work.
Individual membership at £20 a month or £180 annually brings you into serious conversations, member-only events, early industry signals, mentoring, and access to The Foundry pitch process.
Non-resident membership at £100 annually offers full digital access for those beyond Sheffield. Live-streamed events, briefings, archives, and participation without geography as a barrier.
Corporate membership at £495 annually brings up to three team members into the ecosystem for organisations that understand innovation is not a spectator sport.
The free tier ensures access remains open. Because the barrier should not be cost. It should be seriousness.
The 2026 calendar reflects this intent. The next event, 11 February, “From Seed to Scale”, focuses on the real mechanics of building companies that last. Capital, timing, investor alignment. Practical outcomes from people who have done it.
The Digital Forge Awards 2026 will mark a milestone for the community already taking shape across the North.
This is what institutions built for speed look like. Mentorship that matters. Knowledge that arrives before the noise. Execution over appearance.
Final Thought
AI is moving at machine time. We already know what happens when institutions fail to keep up. Social media showed us the cost of delay. With AGI, delay is not caution. It is abdication.
Speed without substance is chaos. Substance without speed is irrelevant.
The Digital Forge exists where those two meet.
If you are a founder, technologist, operator, or investor working in deep tech, manufacturing, or engineering, join the people doing the work that matters.
Membership opens at https://forgedforgrowth.com/join
February’s event registers at https://forgedforgrowth.com/events
Until next Sunday,
David
David Richards MBE is a technology entrepreneur, educator, and commentator.
" Social media reshaped childhood, distorted elections, and fractured any shared grip on truth, while platforms insisted none of it was their fault. We know the cost now. Teenage mental health has collapsed. Anger spreads faster than argument. Democracies feel held together with string."
A magnificent paragraph. Historians will look back on this era; the internet,social media ( has there ever been a more misplaced or erroneous term ? ) and IA as when society changed and began to collapse.
We had oceans of opportunities but we bungled it, we blew it.