What are the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan’s proposals for immigration?
The government has launched the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan with great fanfare, firmly placing it at the heart of their mission to grow Britain’s economy. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle insisted one of his first acts in office last summer was to commission Matt Clifford CBE to write the plan. Despite Britain being the third largest AI market, he warned, “the UK risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.”
The Action Plan includes initiatives such as new AI Growth Zones, the first of which will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, and increasing the public compute capacity twentyfold. A full summary and analysis by techUK can be found here. The Prime Minister launched the plan, appointing Matt Clifford as AI Opportunities Adviser with a team dedicated to delivering the plan.
Working with many tech firms on immigration options at a time the government espouses often contradictory objectives of increasing economic growth and decreasing immigration, we were keen to see their response to recommendations on facilitating visas for the migrant tech talent the AI sector needs. A press release announced that “the Prime Minister is throwing the full weight of Whitehall behind this industry by agreeing to take forward all 50 recommendations set out by Matt Clifford.” However, closer inspection of the government’s separate written response to the report reveals full agreement on 49 of the 50 recommendations and, yes you guessed it, only “partial agreement” with the immigration one.
What are the UK AI Action Plan’s Immigration proposals?
Chair of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency and co-founder of Entrepreneur First, Matt Clifford is one of the world’s leading investors in international talent, so it is unsurprising that his recommendations are emphatic on the importance of competing with other global innovation hubs for the next generation of human capital to fuel Britain’s AI revolution.
The plan’s section on talent warns: “the government’s priority should be to rapidly increase the number of top AI research talents who work in the UK. These leading AI scientists and engineers are few in number and highly prized globally. The countries that attract them will play an outsized role in the future of AI. It is not surprising that the US, which is the number one destination for top talent, has also been at the forefront of recent AI breakthroughs.”
“International competition for top talent is fierce,” Clifford’s Action Plan adds. “The UK must go further than existing measures and take a more proactive approach at every stage of the talent pipeline. Though ambitious, these efforts could yield large benefits for the UK if one individual founds the next DeepMind or OpenAI.”
Within the next year, the AI Action Plan calls on the UK government to “establish an internal headhunting capability on a par with top AI firms to bring a small number of elite individuals to the UK” and calls on Britain to “explore how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent.”
The Plan also proposes expanding the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa – a temporary visa available to graduates from an annual list of around 40 of the world’s top universities. The report warns: “graduates from some leading AI institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and (since 2020) Carnegie Mellon University in the US, are not currently included in the High Potential Individual visa eligibility list. Government should take steps to develop new pathways, and strengthen existing ones, to support these graduates.”
Recent increases in visa and associated fees, as well as minimum salary requirements have made Britain’s immigration system among the most expensive in the world. There are relatively cost effective options for firms that qualify as Scale-ups and for hiring migrant Graduates and New Entrants - especially those with relevant STEM PhDs, but sponsoring international talent in the main work visa routes generally costs more than most other international tech hubs. Last year, the Royal Society reported that the UK’s upfront immigration costs have increased by 126% since 2019 and are now second only to the USA for the Skilled Worker category. So, unsurprisingly, the plan recommends the Government “explore how best to address wider barriers like the cost and complexity of visas which create obstacles for startups and deter overseas talent from re-locating to the UK.”
“Complexity” is an issue too. Many innovators fuelling the UK’s AI sector would be using the Global Talent visa which in their case would mean meeting the strict requirements for endorsement by Tech Nation or conducting research for an approved body. The last government replaced the flawed Start Up and Innovator visas with the Innovator Founder route to attract founding teams to launch innovative, scalable businesses in the UK. Yet this new route still involves complex commercial hurdles in its requirements.
How does the High Potential Individual visa work?
The HPI visa currently allows eligible people who graduated from a list of around 40 top universities in the past five years to come and work in the UK without having to be sponsored by an employer. The visa allows people to bring dependent family and for two years (three years for a PhD), work for an employer without the hurdles of minimum salary restrictions or sponsor duties, work for themselves or start up a business.
The visa launched in 2022 has faced some criticism as some top institutions renowned for cutting-edge computing and AI (like the examples Matt Clifford gives) don’t make the list published every autumn. Each year the list comprises universities that feature in the top 50 of at least two of the Times Higher Education, QS or Academic Ranking of World Universities. These ranking systems tend to favour US universities so usually around half of the universities that would qualify you for an HPI visa if you graduated that year are in the US. That leaves very few qualifying universities from the rest of the world.
In the latest list that would qualify those awarded their qualification between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025, there are 20 US universities: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), New York University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of California San Diego, University of Chicago, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington and Yale.
The country with the second highest number of qualifying universities is China: Fudan University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University from mainland China. The Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Hong Kong are also on the list. There are three Canadian institutions that qualify graduates again this year: McGill University, University of British Columbia and University of Toronto. Japan’s Kyoto University and University of Tokyo feature again, as do Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore.
There are just seven qualifying European universities this year: Germany’s Heidelberg University and University of Munich joining EPFL and ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Switzerland, as well as Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, PSL Research University in France and Technical University of Munich in Germany. The University of Melbourne is the only Australian university on the list this year, indeed the only qualifying institution in the Southern hemisphere.
You can find more details on the HPI visa requirements and the lists of qualifying universities for those who qualified in other years here, plus other UK immigration options for the tech sector here.
What is the government’s response to the report’s immigration recommendations?
“What about the talent?” asked Keir Starmer in his speech launching the AI Action Plan. “Well - we’ve got the High Potential visa route for the world’s top talent to move here and we’re going to make it easier for tomorrow’s talent to learn here, training tens of thousands of STEM graduates and apprentices.”
The government response document contains promises to implement recommendations on education and training for the next generation of home-grown AI talent. However, it insists that the current UK visa offering is “competitive,” adding: “talented AI graduates from institutions not on the HPI eligibility lists can enter the UK through any one of a number of other visa routes, including Skilled Worker, Innovator Founder, Government Authorised Exchange and Global Talent.”
This sounds like a resounding “no” to expanding the HPI or other work visa options for the foreseeable future. However, the UK government has commissioned a review of IT, engineering and telecom work visas. A new body - Skills England – is also set to work on strategies to address skills shortages in the UK. Immigration changes may be on the cards in the more distant future, likely linking training priorities with work immigration, though not necessarily in a way that will expand the UK’s immigration options for the range of talent its AI industry wants to attract.
Authors
Vanessa Ganguin
With almost three decades of specialist experience, Vanessa Ganguin works with firms of all sizes and their staff on their UK immigration paths. Vanessa often writes and presents on UK work and personal immigration issues, including options for the tech sector. Her expert team regularly assist with sponsor and right to work compliance audits and advise on applications for licences to sponsor skilled workers, scale-up sponsor licences, mergers, restructuring, as well as immigration routes to set up a UK business presence.