Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, has said New statesman he has no regrets about allowing Britain’s leading AI company to be sold to foreign ownership and is “delighted” at the prospect of millions of children around the world being taught using AI.
Clegg has worked in the technology industry for most of his post-political career; after losing his seat in the 2015 general election, he became Facebook’s longest-serving lobbyist from 2018 to 2025. He has recently joined the board of two AI-related technology companies, AI education company Efekta and data center provider Nscale, as a director. This week he said he had become “somewhat radicalized” by his experiences in Silicon Valley in believing that Europe should “get together” because the UK and Europe have “a level of dependence” on American technology that is “not compatible with the kind of agency and basic sovereignty that a country like ours should aspire to”.
The UK’s AI agency would be much bigger if one of the most advanced AI research in Britain (and perhaps the world), DeepMind, had not been sold to US ownership in 2014 when it was bought by Google – a sale that took place when Clegg was in government, and to which neither he nor his Lib Dem business secretary, Vince Cable, objected. When he was crushed by New statesman to say whether he regretted allowing some of the world’s most valuable intellectual property to be sold into the hands of a foreign power, he said: “No. My answer is no.”
Clegg said he respected the decision of Demis Hassabis and his co-founders to sell their company to the US, and he acknowledged that the United States had provided the fastest way for them to secure the computing power and capital needed to develop their technology. He said it was “fantastic” that DeepMind remained UK-based, which he said meant the company’s “intellectual capital” was being kept in London (the company’s intellectual property is owned by California-based Alphabet Inc). It was, he said, inevitable that “British companies, born of great minds and great universities, great research and engineering… finding market scale and finding capital elsewhere. And I think we should just be proud of that.”
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In any case, he noted, Britain had missed the boat on building a basic model of AI – the technology that enables all AI applications – because “energy is too expensive” (Clegg famously opposed building nuclear power stations in 2010 because they would not provide power until 2022). It’s also because the government had sided with British musicians, artists and publishers who want to keep their intellectual property, rather than American companies who want to take it without paying to train AI models.
It was necessary, Clegg said, to “grow up about what we mean by being fully British” in terms of technological sovereignty. This is reflected in the two UK-based companies he joined this year: Efekta, the AI education company Clegg said he is “delighted” to be on the advisory board of, ultimately owned and controlled by Switzerland’s EF L3 Group AG. Nscale, the other AI-related company Clegg has joined as a director, is most recently owned by Arkon Energy Pty Ltd, of Australia.
Efekta is a technology spin-out from EF, the world’s largest private education company, which has 52,000 employees in 114 countries. Efekta’s AI learning platform is currently used by more than 4.5 million students, mostly of high school age, in emerging markets such as Brazil and Rwanda.
Florence Nightingale is reported to have said: “Give me the schools of a country and I care not who makes its laws.” Stalin described education as “a weapon whose effects depend on who wields it.” But Clegg said that while he understood that politicians “want to see their views and their worldview reflected in the classroom”, he saw no new political significance in deploying a technology that could be imbued with political ideals to become a teacher or teaching assistant for millions of children around the world. “I don’t think it’s technology that changes that dynamic,” he said.
Efekta’s technology is sold to governments, which have their own priorities for education. China, for example, requires all education to be done in accordance with its “patriotic education” policy. When to New statesman asked Clegg if he had spoken to his new Efekta colleagues about what they would do when asked to comply with such policies, he said he had not. Efekta CEO Stephen Hodges said New statesman: “Those conversations have not come out.” Clegg said the conversations the company had were with local government and school boards, which were focused on improving outcomes “that’s what drives their behavior, not ideology,” he said.
It could be argued that Clegg, despite making his millions in a futuristic industry, is not the greatest judge of long-term consequences. His positions on university tuition fees and the building (or rather, not building) of nuclear power plants would become important political issues a decade later. And here he is again, convinced that the mass deployment of AI agent systems in schools around the world can only be a good thing. In ten years, we will know if he was right.
(Further reading: IT will destroy civilization as we know it)
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