Reuters reports that, with AI accountability stalling, boards should press major technology companies for clearer disclosure and governance evidence, including transparency on human rights impact assessment practice and ethical AI commitments.
GOV.UK announces plans to accelerate advanced nuclear projects, explicitly framing energy supply as part of powering an ‘AI boom’ and supporting economic growth, which is an important policy signal linking compute scale to energy strategy and permitting reform.
Regulation
GOV.UK publishes programme detail for TechLocal, part of the TechFirst initiative, with applications opening on 4 February 2026 and an AI-skills framing, which is relevant to governance because workforce capability is being treated as a policy control for safe adoption.
The UK innovation funding service lists a TechLocal AI Professional Degree and Traineeship Accelerator competition with a text update dated 4 February 2026, aimed at developing Level 6 and Level 7 courses and traineeships for AI roles, signalling continuing government-backed pathways for structured AI capability building.
The UK Digital Trade blog reports on building AI tools that balance innovation and trust, describing how a government team evolved away from an earlier codebase and iterated with users working with Official Sensitive material, which is a useful operational signal for how public-sector AI governance is being implemented in practice.
Cases
Reuters reports that a Kansas federal judge fined lawyers a total of $12,000 after AI-generated submissions contained fictitious citations and quotations, with the court emphasising professional responsibility to verify, even where only one lawyer used the tool. The practical effect is a clear warning that AI-assisted drafting without source checking is sanctionable conduct.
UKIPO Appointed Person on AI “hallucinated” legal materials: In ProHealth Inc v Pro Health Solutions Ltd (BL O/0559/25), the Appointed Person records that the appellant drafted documents with assistance of “Chat GPT” and that submissions contained errors including “quotes” not found in cited decisions and substantial misrepresentation; the decision also draws on Ayinde principles warning about unreliable AI-generated legal research and the professional duty to check against authoritative sources.
Academia
arXiv posted ‘Enhancing Search-Integrated Reasoning via Actor-Refiner Reinforcement Learning’, which is directly relevant to governance because it focuses on agents that query external sources, raising familiar accountability questions about traceability, retrieval quality, and reproducibility of tool-using outputs.
SSRN hosts ‘A Civilizational Governance Gap Why Advanced AI Governance Is Failing’, arguing that governance failure is institutional and upstream of capability choices, which is useful as a framing reference for why documentation and impact processes often lag deployment incentives.
Events
The Chartered Governance Institute UK and Ireland is running ‘AI and Judgment with Professor Sir Andrew Likierman’ in London on 11 February 2026, positioned for governance professionals and focused on how AI affects judgement and decision-making.
IRM UK’s Data Governance, AI Governance and Master Data Management Conference Europe runs in London from 23 to 27 March 2026, designed as an immersive multi-day event on implementation and governance practice across data and AI.
Excel London is hosting Big Data and AI World 2026 on 4 to 5 March 2026 as part of Tech Show London, with an explicit emphasis on responsible and transparent AI and governance-led transformation.
Takeaway
The day’s thread is evidence and execution. Boards are being pressed to demand demonstrable accountability, government is scaling skills and infrastructure programmes tied to AI growth, and courts are showing that weak verification disciplines around generative AI are not tolerated once they reach formal proceedings.
Sources: Reuters, GOV.UK, UK Innovation Funding Service, UK Digital Trade blog, arXiv, SSRN, The Chartered Governance Institute UK and Ireland, IRM UK, Excel London