TechRadar urges UK to reduce reliance on foreign cloud platforms
In a commentary, TechRadar argues that AI-agent incidents, sensitive-data processing and foreign legal jurisdiction make UK dependence on US-controlled cloud infrastructure a digital-sovereignty risk. Citing the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the article says Amazon and Microsoft control 70–90% of the UK cloud-computing market. It calls for more domestic procurement, open standards and open-source infrastructure. The commentary also says recent agent incidents prompted the Trump administration to consider greater control over AI tools.
The commentary directly links foreign ownership and jurisdiction to legal, operational and data-control risks for UK organizations, while arguing that open standards and domestic infrastructure can reduce vendor lock-in and improve migration flexibility.
It is now getting pretty difficult to track every time OpenAI and Anthropic models break containment, wander onto the wider web, and cause unintended, high-risk chaos.
The recent wave of rogue AI agent incidents has now prompted US President Donald Trump’s administration to consider asserting more power over AI tools.
These incidents expose a deep vulnerability for the UK. If advanced AI models are acting unpredictably with sensitive data and carrying out hacking campaigns against real people, what happens when that data is hosted, processed, and governed on foreign-owned infrastructure?
For far too long British IT has essentially handed the keys to US tech giants. The CMA’s market investigation into cloud services found that Amazon and Microsoft control 70-90% of the UK cloud computing market. And another US digital powerhouse in Google controls a smaller share.
These hyperscalers often repeat marketing platitudes about "sovereign" regional data centers located on British soil. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the act of storing data in a UK-based data center is not enough to guarantee sovereignty.
#OpenAI#Anthropic#Amazon#Microsoft#Google#UK Competition and Markets Authority#Proton Research#UK government