Rishi Sunak has been appointed as a senior adviser by the US technology companies Microsoft and Anthropic.
The former British prime minister’s pair of new jobs emerged on Thursday in letters published by Westminster’s office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba). They add to his roles as a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs International, the investment bank, and speechmaker to investment firms including Bain Capital and Makena Capital in the US, which have netted him over £150,000 a talk.
Sunak was prime minister from October 2022 to July 2024, and he joins the $3.9tn technology company Microsoft after applauding it when he was in office as “one of the founding fathers of modern technology”.
He follows Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, in becoming a paid adviser to one of the Silicon Valley giants. Clegg was president of global affairs for Meta, which operates Instagram and Facebook. Sunak’s senior political adviser, Liam Booth-Smith, also took a role with Anthropic, it emerged in June.
The former Conservative leader unveiled a £2.5bn deal with Microsoft’s chief executive, Brad Smith, at the Bletchley Park AI summit in November 2023, in which Microsoft announced what Sunak called a “historic” investment in new datacentres. He also held one-to-one meetings with Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, which committed another £22bn in UK investment last month and with figures from OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, in which Microsoft is a major investor.
Microsoft also has several large contracts with government departments, including the newest memorandum of understanding “representing a yearly spend of £1.4bn to deliver digital transformation, adoption of AI and cloud services”, said Acoba, which approved the appointment on condition of guardrails to prevent conflicts of interest.
In 2023, while Sunak was in 10 Downing Street, the government’s competition watchdog angered Microsoft when it blocked its attempts to buy the Call of Duty maker Activision. The deal went through after it was restructured.
The Westminster authorities cited concerns that “there are risks associated with your access to information that may grant Microsoft an unfair advantage”. Sunak said that he will provide “high-level strategic perspectives on macro-economic and geopolitical trends” and will not advise on UK policy matters.
He will divert his salary from both jobs into the Richmond Project, a charity which sets out to boost social mobility through numeracy that he founded with his wife, Akshata Murty, earlier this year.
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San Francisco-based Anthropic is a $180bn AI startup which provides the Claude AI tools and is a frontrunner, alongside Google DeepMind and OpenAI, in the race to AGI – artificial general intelligence, which is considered to have capacities that are human-level or greater. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, earlier this year predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
Acoba said that while AI was a significant priority when Sunak was PM, including enacting legislation affecting companies in the AI sector, “there is no suggestion any decisions or actions were taken in office in expectation of this role, and the Cabinet Office confirmed it is not aware of any decisions you made that were specific to Anthropic, as opposed to sector wide.”
It said, “there is a reasonable concern that your appointment could be seen to offer unfair access and influence within the UK government”, which was heightened “at a time of intense debate and lobbying around the world” on the right approach to regulating the increasingly powerful technology. But Sunak told the committee the role will be internallyoriented and will not involve any lobbying.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said it was pleased to welcome Sunak.
“He was among the first global leaders to recognize AI’s transformative potential, establishing the world’s first AI Safety Institute and convening the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park,” they said. “His experience will provide valuable strategic perspective as we work to ensure AI benefits humanity. This internally-focused, part-time advisory role fully complies with the conditions of Acoba, and Mr Sunak is donating his entire compensation to the Richmond Project charity.”
Sunak said he was “excited to help these two companies, as they address the big strategic questions about how to make tech work for our economies, our security and our society”.
“We stand on the edge of a technological revolution whose impacts will be as profound as those of the industrial revolution: and felt more quickly,” he said. “In my role as a senior adviser, I want to help these companies ensure that this shift delivers the improvements in all of our lives that it can.”
Microsoft was approached for comment.
