TL;DR
Mike Bracken, who founded the Government Digital Service and led the build of GOV.UK, warns that public institutions are losing the freedom to make their own decisions as they come to depend on AI from a small number of providers. The argument previews his forthcoming book, “Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide”. His central claim is that sovereignty is measured by whether an organisation can still change direction, not by who owns the infrastructure or where it sits.
The argument
Bracken’s case is that control is rarely taken away. It is surrendered gradually, through procurement and technology choices that each look sensible at the time. “Institutions rarely lose sovereignty in a crisis. They lose it one reasonable decision at a time,” he said.
He is critical of the current policy emphasis. Governments are putting money into sovereign models, domestic compute and national strategies, but Bracken argues this focuses on ownership when the real question is practical: can the institution still act independently when suppliers, markets or geopolitics shift? The same risk applies, he says, well beyond Whitehall: charities and universities that outsource their platforms face it too.
“Every institution depends on technology. The question is whether that technology expands your freedom to act or quietly narrows it,” he said.
What it looks like in practice
Some of the UK’s recent public-sector AI work is a direct test of his framing. The housing department’s shared platform puts about 20 AI models behind one governed gateway, so teams stop building their own integrations with individual providers. In our view, a multi-model route like that is the kind of design that keeps the option to change course open. By contrast, a single-supplier deal signed quickly to get a pilot live is how the dependency he describes accumulates.
The government’s £100m sovereign AI competitions let the winning start-ups keep ownership of what they build. On Bracken’s test, the question for each award is the buyer’s side of that arrangement: whether the public body can still walk away later.
Looking forward
Since leaving government, Bracken has co-founded Public Digital, a consultancy that advises governments in several countries on digital transformation. For UK public bodies, his argument translates into a procurement checklist: exit terms, portability of data and prompts, and the ability to run more than one model. For suppliers, it signals that lock-in may become harder to sell as a feature.