There is a particular kind of danger that does not arrive with sirens or explosions, but rather in the quiet spread of a lie, a manipulated image, a forged article, or a bot-filled comment section. That was the danger the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, chose to place at the centre of his first address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Speaking to world leaders, he warned that recent years had seen “an industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment” in the UK and many of its allies. It was a powerful phrase, intended to shake governments out of any lingering complacency. According to the Prime Minister, this is not an occasional problem or an unfortunate side effect of the internet. It is a deliberate, well-funded and organised campaign to undermine what people believe, how they vote, and how they feel about one another. He pointed directly at Russian agencies, describing how they have used bots, fake websites and falsified news articles to spread lies and prey on people’s fears. They have amplified far-right narratives, he said. They have tried to interfere in democratic processes, including the 2019 general election in the UK. They have attempted to stoke tensions and unrest after horrific events, using public fear and grief as fuel for division. The scale of the operation is immense: the Kremlin is believed to spend around £1.3 billion every year on manipulating information. On top of that, British companies and institutions have faced sustained cyber-attacks. And then came the line that tied the whole speech together: artificial intelligence will only multiply the threat. What human trolls and disinformation workers can do slowly, AI could do quickly, at scale, and with terrifying realism. Mr Burnham’s speech was therefore not simply a report on past abuses. It was a call to understand that the way people receive news and form opinions has become a battleground, and that democracies must learn to defend themselves on that battleground or risk losing what makes them democratic.
In response to that threat, the Prime Minister announced the creation of a new National Centre for Information Defence. The name itself is striking. It suggests that defending information is no longer about censoring speech or countering one bad article at a time; it is about building something as serious as a military defence system, but for the mind. The Centre’s job will be to detect, attribute and disrupt information attacks, while also supporting and defending democracy. This means understanding where a lie came from, who is spreading it, and how to stop it before it reaches millions of people. It means treating disinformation as an attack on national security rather than as a nuisance to be handled by social media companies alone. Mr Burnham also made clear that the UK does not intend to keep these lessons to itself. He noted that Britain had already supported Moldova, a country that has faced alleged Russian interference, in protecting its elections. As more elections approach across Europe, he said, more nations are grappling with these issues, some for the first time. They are discovering how quickly a campaign of lies can distort public debate and shake confidence in institutions. The UK, he said, is ready to share its understanding of how these actors work and how other countries can respond. That offer of cooperation is not simply a matter of generosity. It is a recognition that disinformation does not respect borders. A lie that gains strength in one country can easily cross into another. An attack on a small nation’s election can teach the rest of the world what to expect. Collective security now means collective defence of the truth. The new Centre, then, is not only about protecting British citizens; it is about creating a playbook that allies can use, adapt and improve together. Just as a community builds flood defences by sharing knowledge about rising waters, so too must democracies build defences against the rising tide of manipulated information.
The second major theme of the address was artificial intelligence. Mr Burnham described Frontier AI, the cutting edge of this technology, as “one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our age.” The phrase captured the double nature of the moment. On one hand, AI holds the potential to transform medicine, education, energy, transportation, and countless other fields. It could help solve problems that have puzzled humanity for generations. On the other hand, it could become a weapon of enormous destructive power if left in the wrong hands or developed without guardrails. The Prime Minister was clear about who should make the fundamental decisions about AI: not private companies alone, not unaccountable programmers, and not chance. “These decisions are too important to be left to chance,” he said. They must be taken by elected governments who serve working people. That is a powerful democratic statement. It suggests that ordinary citizens, regardless of whether they own powerful computers or work in technology industries, should have a say in how AI shapes their lives. To make that idea real, Mr Burnham announced that the UK is developing a new AI defence partnership with the United States. The partnership will focus on protecting critical national infrastructure. That includes hospitals, electricity grids, water systems, banks, and every other part of modern life that depends on computer networks. In a world where AI can be used to launch cyber-attacks, to break through digital defences, or to create convincing false information, protecting that infrastructure becomes as important as protecting physical borders. The partnership is a signal that the UK and the US are prepared to work together on the front lines of this new technological struggle. But Mr Burnham also insisted that the UK would bring a wider group of people together to use AI for good while addressing its risks. He did not pretend there is a simple answer. Instead, he presented a vision of democratic leadership in the age of intelligent machines, a vision in which governments, not algorithms, set the boundaries within which innovation can flourish.
To give that vision a global shape, the Prime Minister called for work toward a single set of global principles and standards to ensure the safe development of artificial intelligence. This is a bold ambition. The internet has always been borderless, and AI is now being developed in many countries with many different legal systems and political traditions. Without shared standards, there is a risk that some nations will cut corners on safety in order to move faster, or that others will use AI in ways that violate human rights, destabilise elections, or spread disinformation. Standards and principles, Mr Burnham argued, can provide the transparency and access needed to increase preparedness and to ensure that AI development is safe. In other words, the world needs to know what powerful AI systems are doing, how they are trained, and what safeguards they contain. Transparency is not just a technical requirement; it is a democratic one. People need to be able to trust that the systems shaping their news, their jobs and their public debates are not secretly working against them. The Prime Minister also announced that this initiative would build on recent international discussions and place AI at the heart of the UK’s G20 Presidency in 2027. That gave the speech a longer horizon. The UK is thinking beyond the immediate crisis and trying to shape the global agenda for years to come. Mr Burnham said the UK would work with other countries on key issues, including harnessing AI’s potential, addressing associated risks, and ensuring that AI development remains safe. The idea is not to stop AI or to fear it, but to manage it in the same way previous generations managed nuclear energy, civil aviation or global banking. Those industries are not perfect, but they are governed by international rules that make them safer and more accountable than they would otherwise be. AI deserves the same treatment. The alternative is a race to the bottom, where countries compete to see who can build the most powerful machine with the fewest restrictions. That is not a race anyone should want to win.
The Prime Minister’s speech, however, was not only about technology and disinformation. He also addressed global security, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and the conflict in the Middle East. These issues may seem separate from AI and online manipulation, but they are connected in important ways. Wars and climate disasters create fear, uncertainty and suffering. They are exactly the conditions that hostile actors exploit when they spread lies and stoke unrest. A country struggling to recover from a flood, a war or an attack is more vulnerable to false narratives that blame rivals, divide communities or undermine faith in the future. Mr Burnham did not present these global crises as a simple list of headlines. He framed them as shared tests that the world must pass together. The war in Ukraine, for example, has shown how disinformation can be used to justify aggression and to confuse international opinion. The conflict in the Middle East has produced scenes of terrible suffering, and those scenes can be manipulated to inflame hatred and deepen divisions. Climate change, meanwhile, is a crisis that demands enormous international cooperation, but it too is increasingly surrounded by false claims and organised denial. By placing these issues together in one speech, the Prime Minister was making a larger argument: the health of the information environment is not a luxury or a technical matter. It is part of the basic architecture of international peace. If people cannot agree on what is true, they cannot solve their other problems. If nations cannot trust the information they use to make decisions, they cannot cooperate. The fight against disinformation and the push for safe AI are therefore not separate from the fight for security, climate justice and peace. They are all part of the same struggle to build a world where facts still matter and where governments can act on the basis of evidence rather than fear.
Taken together, Mr Burnham’s address was an attempt to turn anxiety into action. The threats are real and growing, but his message was not one of despair. He spoke of a National Centre for Information Defence, of partnerships with other nations, and of a determined effort to establish global principles for AI. These are concrete steps, not vague promises. They reflect a belief that democracies are capable of meeting the moment if they are willing to learn, cooperate and act. At its best, the speech was a reminder that the fight against disinformation is ultimately about people. It is about protecting a parent’s ability to know what is safe for their child. It is about protecting a worker’s right to vote based on honest information. It is about protecting the ability of communities to mourn, argue, deliberate and decide without being manipulated by hidden forces. The Prime Minister’s phrase about decisions being made by elected governments who serve working people captured that human dimension. Governments are not perfect, and elected leaders can be wrong, but they can be changed at the ballot box. Algorithms and foreign intelligence agencies cannot. In the end, the UK’s promise to fight disinformation at home and abroad, and to work toward global standards for safe AI, is a promise to keep that basic human right alive: the right to see the world clearly, to understand it, and to play a part in shaping it. Whether the rest of the world will join that effort remains to be seen, but the speech made the British position clear. The age of AI cannot be an age of lies. It must be an age of responsibility, and that responsibility belongs to all of us.