TL;DR

The UK and Norway have made AI a new strand of their strategic partnership. A joint statement of intent, agreed on 12 November by UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan and Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s digitalisation minister, lists six areas to explore together, from compute to defence. The statement is explicitly non-binding.

The two met at the Atlantic Futures Forum. Their statement builds on the strategic partnership declaration Keir Starmer and Jonas Gahr Støre agreed in December 2024, which already covered security, resilience and growth.

The six areas

The commitments are framed as possibilities rather than projects:

• Compute: cooperation on infrastructure and hardware, so that government workloads and nationally owned compute can sit securely with commercial hosts, plus trials and adoption of AI chips and novel hardware from either country.
• Defence: closer links between Taskforce RAID on the UK side and the Norwegian defence data and AI centre, aimed at jointly developing and testing AI-enabled military capabilities.
• AI security: best-practice sharing on testing and evaluation between the UK AI Security Institute and AI Norway, with cybersecurity input from each country’s national cyber agency, the NCSC and NSM.
• Governance: work towards international AI rules that fit together, including through standards bodies and multilateral forums.
• Research ecosystems: exchanges between funders, researchers and companies, informed by the UK Industrial Strategy.
• Converging technologies: discussion of how AI interacts with quantum, biotechnology and robotics.

Officials in both governments will coordinate, and the ministers say they will stay in regular contact.

A defence deal the same day

The statement arrived alongside a concrete example. At the same forum, the Chief of the Defence Staff announced a multi-million pound Royal Navy contract with British defence scale-up Arondite for its Cobalt software, which Norwegian forces will be able to trial alongside UK commandos. Arondite also said it will open its first overseas office, in Oslo, and invest £35 million there over five years.

Looking Forward

The document states plainly that it creates no rights or obligations and that any work depends on each side’s laws and resources. In our view, the most practical strand for UK readers is the AISI link, because shared testing methods between allied security institutes could influence how advanced models are assessed. The compute strand is worth watching too, given that the statement counts clean energy among the two countries’ complementary strengths, but it names no sites, budgets or dates.