Amanda Brock

Part of the IT Leaders 100 - a list of the most influential IT leaders in the UK in 2025.

Amanda has been CEO of OpenUK since 2019, and also brings 25 years of legal experience to her work. She has been instrumental in shaping open source, internet law and AI's legal frameworks.

Amanda is an international keynote speaker and regular tech press contributor, as well as the editor of Open Source: Law, Policy and Practice.

Amanda sits on a multitude of advisory boards and works with the UK government.

What's the most exciting part of your current role?

My role is unique. As a UK leader bringing the UK's open tech community together across software, hardware, data and AI, I am constantly engaged with the global tech sector. All of open tech forms critical parts of this. This exposure facilitates my interacting with people who are at the forefront of new technologies and innovation every day. Learning about their key challenges and drivers, as well as how both big tech and little tech are managing and exploring these in the USA, Asia and of course the UK, influences my understanding and thinking.

Coupled with over 30 years in and around the global tech sector, this inside track allows me to see where markets are going and to sit on the cutting edge of policy discussions and thought leadership. I view this as a huge privilege. It's what allows me and OpenUK to contribute to the world through research and reporting on these new topics - our latest include securing agentic AI with identity and sustainable AI data centres. It enables my writing and contributing to the tech press, speaking globally and contributing to tech policy and thinking in what I hope is an effective way.

What do you consider your greatest IT achievement of the last 12 months?

The French government's invitation to attend their Paris AI Action Summit as one of a small number of people from tech, academia and civil society invited globally feels like my biggest achievement. I was part of a relatively small group of people from the UK and the only individual invited to represent the open source community, as opposed to a tech organisation that is open source. Nobody in such a community role has been invited to any of the prior summits. The invite was to me as an individual in recognition of my work in open source and AI.

Today, I regularly speak and write about AI openness. OpenUK, the organisation I lead, was the only organisation in the world of openness to partner with Meta in July 2023 supporting Llama 2's launch. This was not fully open source, but we saw it as a step in the right direction and it has proven to be one of the single most impactful events in our AI history and enabling open source in AI. Without this we wouldn't have DeepSeek's R1.

OpenUK has gone on to write several update reports on AI openness and reported from the Action Summit.

What's the biggest challenge facing IT leaders today, and how are you tackling it?

Cutting through the hype to see the wood from the trees in the AI bubble is very much at the forefront of all IT leaders' minds, but this has need has been enhanced and more challenging due to geopolitics.

I have been at the forefront of the conversations on both of these interrelated areas: the impact of geopolitics on digital generally and AI more specifically.

Having faced the challenges of staying engaged in open tech post-Brexit and facing the EU's anti-UK stance meant that I began to focus on how geopolitics would influence open source and our global tech sector a few years before most. This has led me to have relatively clear if not always mainstream thinking about the challenges and to effectively add to the conversation at a policy and strategic level by leveraging my influence in speaking and writing, as well as events. It feels like sometimes we have to be brave to call out the Emperor's new clothes.

These combined challenges are making life hard for IT leaders, and I am able to bring policy understanding and tech history to the real world conversation to offer a pragmatic solution.

What piece of technology could you not live without, and why?

I could not live without my laptop. I spend more time on it than I do with any human being and effectively my life is managed via it. Increasingly, it has become my window to the world. Although others have tried to get me to shift away from it to other devices, I always come back to the laptop as my go-to device.

What excites you most about the future of IT?

The endless possibility of IT has always been what attracted me to it, since I first stumbled into tech law in 1996.

I am attracted by shaping the new, whether that is a product or a policy, and this has been at the centre of my career working in an ISP in the dot.com boom, working in an open source company as the US began to adopt at scale, and today working in the AI and openness space.

Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time, has been extended to tech, meaning that tech expands to fill the capacity - whether that's internet bandwidth or Nvidia GPUs. Our tech future and innovation potential will expand to the extent of our collective imagination as a society. That possibility today remains as exciting to me as it was 30 years ago.

What’s the strangest job you’ve ever had?

This is one of the hardest questions as I have had a number of strange jobs. Picking potatoes aged eight (which at the time seemed very lucrative), to becoming a tech lawyer or leading a UK industry organisation at the cutting edge of global tech has been a strange process.

Singling one of these out, as a lawyer from the commercial mainstream of tech, shifting to Canonical in 2008 and becoming part of the open source community has to be the strangest job. I was suddenly thrust into a US-style, engineer-led organisation of primarily neurodiverse individuals changing the world with their groundbreaking technology. I doubt many would have enjoyed it, but I loved it and fell in love with open source software and its community in the process.

If you could instantly master one new skill, what would it be?

I would learn to prompt AI to manage secure agentic AI delivery in a way that would enable my organisation to shift our dull, repetitive tasks to this securely. I am actually trying this out in real life and do hope to master that skill, but it will take time. It would make life significantly easier if I both mastered this, and it was instant ;-)