We don’t usually pay attention to LinkedIn updates. Yet when Rishi Sunak, former UK Prime Minister, updated his profile to “Advisor at Microsoft and Anthropic,” the signal was unmistakable. This wasn’t a routine career move. It was a declaration that the AI industry’s next battlefield is not model architecture or training data—it’s policy influence. For those of us who have spent years in decentralized protocol design, this event feels like a warning bell. The same pattern of power concentration that we saw in traditional finance is now repeating in AI, and the blockchain community has a unique lens to interpret it.
Context Sunak’s background is not incidental. As PM, he spearheaded the UK’s AI Safety Summit in November 2023, producing the Bletchley Declaration that called for international AI governance. He positioned Britain as a neutral hub for AI safety. Now, just months after leaving office, he joins the payroll of two companies that are deeply embedded in the AI race. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and another $13 billion in Anthropic. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, markets itself as the “responsible AI” alternative. Sunak’s dual advisory role for both creates a triangular relationship: a former regulator now advising two firms that compete and collaborate simultaneously. This is the classic revolving door, but with a new technological twist.
Core The commercialization of political influence is not new, but in AI it takes on a distinct urgency. The global regulatory framework is still being written—EU AI Act, US executive orders, UK white papers. The window to shape these rules is narrow, and companies that can place their people inside the policy conversation gain a structural advantage. Based on my own experience auditing the DAO hack in 2017, I learned that centralization of decision-making, even when masked by technical elegance, creates single points of failure. The DAO’s failure was not just a reentrancy bug; it was a governance failure. Sunak’s appointment is a governance failure waiting to happen. It blurs the line between public interest and private profit.
The bear market didn’t teach me to fear regulation; it taught me to demand transparency. In 2022, when DeFi protocols collapsed, the ones that survived were those with clear, auditable governance. Sunak’s role lacks that transparency. We don’t know his compensation, his exact duties, or whether he will lobby for specific policies. The UK’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) has no binding power. This opacity is dangerous for a technology that claims to be building trust through code.
From a competitive standpoint, the move fortifies the Microsoft-Anthropic alliance against OpenAI. Sunak’s network in the UK and beyond gives them a direct line to G7 policymakers. Meanwhile, decentralized AI projects—like those using blockchain for model provenance, data sovereignty, or DAO-based governance—struggle without such political access. The asymmetry of influence is growing.
Contrarian Yet there is a counter-narrative worth exploring. Perhaps Sunak’s appointment will actually accelerate the push for decentralized governance. When the public sees former leaders cozying up to AI giants, the demand for transparent, on-chain decision-making may rise. I built a prototype called TruthLayer in 2025 to prove authenticity of AI-generated content using blockchain. The feedback was clear: users wanted human oversight, but they also wanted that oversight to be auditable. Sunak’s move could be the catalyst that convinces regulators to mandate open-source governance models for AI systems. Instead of trusting a former politician, we could trust a smart contract that encodes rules verifiably. The irony is that the same political power that threatens decentralization might also provoke its adoption.
Takeaway Who writes the rules for AI? If it’s former politicians paid by the companies they once regulated, the answer is troubling. But if we can encode those rules in transparent, decentralized protocols, we have a chance. About Me: I’m Chris Thompson, a decentralized protocol PM in Nairobi who has watched power concentrate in tech for a decade. The question is not whether Sunak should advise Microsoft and Anthropic. The question is whether we, as a community, can build a system where such influence is visible, accountable, and ultimately replaceable by code.
