The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is partnering with Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, to build and pilot an AI-powered assistant for the GOV.UK website following DSIT’s “scan, pilot, scale” framework supporting testing and iteration prior to wider roll-out.
The AI assistant is said to help people visiting the government website to navigate services, with an initial focus on employment, finding work, accessing training, and understanding available resources.
According to Anthropic, the assistant will be capable of maintaining context across interactions, allowing people to pick up from where they left off when returning to the website. Users will also have “full control” over their data, it states, including what is remembered about their interactions.
The partnership builds on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by Anthropic in February 2025, relating to the exploration of the potential for AI to enhance public services for UK citizens. “The GOV.UK AI assistant, powered by Claude, is one of the first major outcomes of that work,” Anthropic explains. “It’s an agentic system designed to go beyond answering questions – actively guiding people through government processes with individually-tailored support.”
Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK&I, Northern Europe & Israel, said: “This is about more than technology. It’s about building AI safety expertise within government, ensuring civil servants can independently maintain and evolve the system, and demonstrating that frontier AI can be deployed responsibly for genuine public benefit.”
Wider trend: AI in health and care
HTN was joined by Neill Crump, digital strategy director at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, and Lee Rickles, CIO at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, to discuss practical steps health and care organisations can take to prepare for AI. Neill and Lee shared details of their current work and their journey to date, best practices, learnings, challenges, and the opportunities that lie ahead.
An automatic AI system developed by Alder Hey clinicians and researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool has received a £1.2 million grant from the NIHR Invention for Innovation programme. The system automates x-ray interpretation, data capture, and monitoring, with an AI algorithm trained on thousands of x-ray images that is capable of locating hip bone outlines and detecting cases where dislocation is beginning to happen. In testing, Alder Hey reports that it has performed similarly to human medical experts in terms of accuracy, whilst taking “a fraction of the time” on the analysis.
HTN took a deep dive into AI in healthcare to learn more about progress over the last 12 months, sharing notable news stories, webinars, plans, strategies, and features. Key areas include the use of AI in GP services, planned NHS App functionality, AI in improving efficiency and reducing admin burden, and the launch of several new AI strategies from NHS Trusts.
