An artificial intelligence startup that was hired to work with Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign has been awarded at least seven government … Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with several other companies the firm had a contract with the Government to build a £250 million AI lab for NHSX. Dominic Cummings spent three years in post-Soviet Russia in the late 1990s – as an ‘investment analyst’, he told the BBC in 2002. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief advisor, is famously said to have put on his WhatsApp profile: “Get Brexit done, then Arpa”. Ben Warner, a data scientist at Faculty, was recruited by Cummings to work at Downing Street.

According to reports in the Guardian, Faculty has links with senior Tory figures including government adviser Dominic Cummings. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, recruited one of Faculty’s data scientists to work with him in Downing Street. Faculty Science Ltd (formerly ASI Data Science and Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd.) is a British technology company based in London, founded in 2014, by Marc Warner.. Warner is a graduate student of Harvard and London Centre for Nanotechnology.ASI has worked on more than 200 artificial intelligence projects, with partners including London Irish, easyJet, Tesco and the BBC. Faculty’s lawyers said its NHS contract was the result of a tender process that was not influenced by Cummings. According to the Guardian, Faculty – which had a pre-existing contract with other companies to help build a £250 million artificial intelligence lab for the NHSX subsidiary – took on a leading role in the data response to the pandemic. Both the Warner brothers and Dominic Cummings have attended meetings of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE). His brother, Marc, who serves as CEO at Faculty, is believed to have attended Sage committee meetings with Cummings. In another Guardian article we learned that that ‘Faculty’ had actually been given 7 government contracts over the last 18 months and that Dominic Cummings has been blogging about his excitement over the “disruptive potential of new technologies and artificial intelligence” for years.