The current development of artificial intelligence (AI) is sustained by powerful imaginaries that describe possible technological futures aligning with the normative preferences of influential actors. We show how an AI imaginary driven by ‘Big Tech’ corporate interests and technosolutionism has influenced the development of an AI/cybersecurity imaginary in the UK. Building on the Science and Technology Studies concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we adopt a technopolitical lens to examine how external notions of AI progress and development interacted with internal UK government commitments to cybersecurity. Drawing on UK government texts and interviews with 37 officials, non-government experts and industry actors, we trace the emergence of anAI/cybersecurity imaginary between 2022 and 2024, how intragovernment controversies were negotiated and resolved, and how this imaginary stabilised in UK security politics with identifiable outcomes in cybersecurity governance. The article contributes empirical support for the importance of sociotechnical imaginaries in understanding security trajectories, how corporate and technosolutionist imaginaries influence government policy and practice, and offer theoretical insights into the dynamics of imaginary formation and function. AI imaginaries promote the goals and values of science and technology, while technopolitics dominated by corporate actors and technoscientific optimism constrain governmental and social capacity to create and enact alternativeimaginaries of future cybersecurity.
Muller et al. (Thu,) studied this question.