Can the UK take the opportunity open to it in China?

Success isn’t about being the first mover, but a thoughtful one

Despite being Europe's leader in open source, the UK is falling behind China in developing the ecosystem.

Liz Kendall gave her first speech on AI last week, only six months after taking on her role as Secretary of State for the Department of Culture Media and Sport.

A closed group of 120 invitees were treated to the first anniversary of the AI Action plan with a re-hash of existing achievements over the last year, including the fact that three quarters of the AI Action plan has been achieved. A dashboard demonstrating that progress was released afterwards.

Given the opportunity to ask one of the three questions the Secretary of State took following her speech, I probed on why - despite the UK being Europe's leader in open source - it is not included in any of our AI policies, contrasting this with China's long-standing open source strategy included in the country’s last two Five Year Plans.

The Secretary of State acknowledged this as a "really important and pressing issue," and said conversations are being had on this topic. For the UK’s technologists, that conversation would be a welcome one, but how can we get into the room where it is being had?

In a day when the government’s focus was split between Keir Starmer’s visit to China and the new AI skills announcement, it is unsurprising that both sovereignty and China featured high in the questions and discussions, as well as on the Today programme that preceded the event. The big picture is needed, but the roadmap to arrive there successfully relies on the right decisions based on good understanding now.

In December, I visited Beijing to keynote an open source conference and see the launch of the China translation of Open Source Law, Policy and Practice. We formalised working with the local open source community in China to produce a China open source AI report, which should be ready for publication by March.

This collaboration opens up previously unseen local data, and OpenUK’s deep understanding of data analysis in open source - a bit of a dark art - will allow us to produce a report on AI that is both meaningful and unique.

Conversations with the local engineers and open source AI producers made clear that some of the success was down to distinctions in engineering practices. For example, Chinese developers’ obsession with compute availability and love of slim, low compute models led to the distillation of Chinese Qwen and US Llama to build DeepSeek R1 almost exactly a year ago. This is a perfect example of the way open source enables iterative global innovation through shared access to software projects.

But China didn’t suddenly get to open source in 2025. The country’s leadership shifted the approach in a measured way in 2017. This was some six years after the UK public sector led the world with an ‘open source first’ strategy from Lord Francis Maude’s Cabinet Office, and aligned closely to Mike Bracken’s work in building Government Digital Service (GDS). There is, however, a stark distinction between the two nations.

China has followed a clear and concerted pathway to build the environment and ecosystem, and its Five Year Plans in both 2020 and 2025 have put open source at the centre of that strategy. The UK has almost failed to include the words open source in any of its policies since its initial leadership in 2011. China’s update to its strategy around open source focuses on reducing local competition between Chinese projects by streamlining the product base and clearly tying its measure of open source to economic success.

In China, open source was valued appropriately and small shifts like Huawei appointing a new Chief Strategy Officer with a US open source background are evidence of this. China has worked to build out the structures needed to enable open source at a policy level as well as a technical one. It enabled local IP holding and governance by creating its Open Atom foundation, removing the need to use US equivalents as the only alternative. This has enabled its ecosystem to succeed.

OpenUK is now working with UKRI on the UK’s approach and how to bring that spirit of 2011 back to the fore. Despite the lack of support, the UK remains Europe’s leader in open source in software and AI. Building an independent approach that collaborates with the best in the world, and values the UK’s own technical and development skills, will be essential.

Liz Kendall was clear that being first mover in innovation isn’t the route to winning, but rather that those who implement the technology into their productivity cycles and businesses win. That’s all too evident in the difference in the UK and China’s approach to their AI and open source strategies today. A shift to clear open source policies is needed for the UK in both our infrastructure and AI planning, including our revamp of GDS.

The UK has long been responsible for contributing some of the biggest and most impactful innovations to the digital roadmap. If we want to sit at the future winners table it's time to set our own course to open, as part of that journey to success.

Amanda Brock is CEO of OpenUK