Today, Barclays announced an investment in CommonAI, supporting the acceleration and development of artificial intelligence capabilities across the UK.

Founded by Anthemis and Cambridge AI Venture Partners, CommonAI brings together startups, enterprises, engineers and academics to develop, test and deploy AI systems at scale through its collaborative engineering and compute platform.

Through its membership model, CommonAI also aims to close the scale and knowledge gap in AI development that can hold back start-ups and small businesses from competing globally. It does this by providing access to models, training data, hardware design and affordable compute power, empowering organisations to build business-specific AI solutions safely, without prohibitive development costs.

To coincide with Barclays’ investment, CommonAI is launching its High Assurance AI programme, focused on developing AI systems capable of operating autonomously to safely make decisions when operating in high-risk environments, such as financial services, where accuracy, explainability and accountability are essential. Coinciding with the High Assurance programme, Anthemis intends to raise a fund seeking to back startups operating in this space.

Barclays will become a member of the High Assurance programme and look to leverage the platform to identify strategic use cases and develop solutions to industry-wide challenges within financial services.

Kristen Bennie, Group Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Barclays, said:

“Artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses operate and innovate. By supporting CommonAI, we are helping to build a more open and collaborative ecosystem that can accelerate the development and adoption of AI across the UK, allowing businesses of all sizes, including Barclays, to access the capabilities and expertise to innovate and compete globally.”

Amy Nauiokas, Founder and Group CEO, Anthemis, and Director, CommonAI, said:

“Barclays’ backing underscores the importance of building trusted UK AI infrastructure. As AI moves from experimentation into real-world deployment, the next phase of development will depend on building systems that can operate safely, reliably and at scale across critical industries. CommonAI’s focus on high assurance development will support exactly that – whilst helping create the conditions for the next generation of scalable, commercially viable AI companies to emerge, further supported by Anthemis’ dedicated fund.”

Gavin Ferris, CEO, CommonAI CIC, said:

“The UK has a major opportunity in AI, but that long-term leadership will depend on building sovereign capability to develop and deploy trusted systems domestically. Barclays’ support reflects growing recognition that trusted UK AI capabilities will be critical to enabling adoption across regulated and mission-critical sectors. This comes following the launch of our Scaling Inference programme with ARIA to improve how AI systems run at scale in real-world data-centre environments.”