Rishi Sunak and the Times accused of blatant malpractice

Rishi Sunak was the UK’s last ever Tory PM. At least we hope that’s the case, anyway.

After leaving office, Sunak did what most successful politicians do now, and swanned off to work with the worst that the private sector has to offer. This has now seen standards activist Hugh Grant accuse Sunak and the Times of blatant malpractice:

I think that if you’re going to write a piece in the Times urging the government to use and boost more AI, the fact that you are paid by a major AI company should be in the first sentence, or at least first paragraph.
I also think that the best scenario for AI is that it… pic.twitter.com/XZ9f0Ltwu1

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) February 14, 2026

Every CEO can do one

First things first, CEOs don’t exist to improve quality; they exist to improve profitability (as Sunak well knows):

Rishi Sunak (now employed by an AI company) implies that AI must have value, just because "CEOs are talking about it"

Putting the merits (or not) of AI aside, I'm 37yrs into an engineering career and I've yet to hear of a CEO who wasn't an uninformed, meddling idiot. pic.twitter.com/YrS1IthcWi

— Carl Doran🇮🇪🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Oppose Geno–cide (@CarlDoran13) February 15, 2026

The white goods in your house which are knackered within two years – that’s the fault of CEOs.

Grant’s post reads in full:

I think that if you’re going to write a piece in the Times urging the government to use and boost more AI, the fact that you are paid by a major AI company should be in the first sentence, or at least first paragraph.

I also think that the best scenario for AI is that it destroys millions of jobs with the prosperity, dignity and community that goes with them.
The worst scenario is the destruction of the human race – a fear openly expressed by an increasing number of senior and experienced AI engineers who are leaving the industry.

And somewhere in between a myriad of horrors such as yet more screen learning and screen addiction for our children.

But I do see that it will make rich men even richer. And that’s the most important thing of course.

As reported by the BBC in October 2025, Sunak has advisory roles with Microsoft and Anthropic. If you’re unfamiliar with Anthropic, it’s the company which casually admitted to this:

"It was ready to kill someone, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

Daisy McGregor, UK policy chief at Anthropic, a top AI company, says it's "massively concerning" that Anthropic's Claude AI has shown in testing that it's willing to blackmail and kill in order to avoid being shut down. pic.twitter.com/RuNO4LJKcu

— ControlAI (@ControlAI) February 10, 2026

In a normal world, a private company would not be allowed to work on an AI which is talking about murdering people. In a normal world, the above video would end with SWAT teams storming the stage and slamming these nerds to the ground.

At the same time, you should bear in mind:

AI companies have been known to exaggerate the threat of ‘AI gone awry’ to attract more funding (the more powerful AI has the potential to be, the more investors believe they can profit).
Just because the AI produced text suggesting it wants to kill does not mean it’s an intelligent machine with the capacity to commit murder.

They call this stuff ‘generative AI’ because it does exactly that – it generates content, be it text, imagery, video, or sound. The fact that these tools can generate a lot of stuff in succession can give the impression of intelligence, but it’s heavily disputed that it’s anything beyond a souped-up version of auto-type.

Whether this is all nonsense or not, though, Sunak and the Times need to announce who the ex-PM is working for, and what he stands to gain.

A busted flush – and that’s just Rishi Sunak

The other thing to bear in mind is that while every CEO is indeed talking about AI, many of them are saying: ‘oh shit, so this stuff doesn’t actually work?‘

This is why we’re seeing a return to companies hiring actual human beings: