Ian Hogarth
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Ian Hogarth is a British technology entrepreneur, investor, and writer who serves as the founding chair of the UK AI Safety Institute, the government research body that was renamed the AI Security Institute in 2025. Before entering public service he co-founded the live-music discovery company Songkick, became an unusually early angel investor in machine-learning startups, helped build the European venture firm Plural, and since 2018 has co-authored the widely read annual State of AI Report with the investor Nathan Benaich. He is also known for a 2023 Financial Times essay, "We must slow down the race to God-like AI," which helped move frontier-AI risk into mainstream policy debate. [1][2][6]
In 2023 Time magazine named Hogarth one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence, and in 2024 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to artificial intelligence. [1][10]
Hogarth was educated at Dulwich College in south London before reading engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours and specialised in machine learning during his master's year. [1][2] He has said his interest in the field dates back to 2004, when as a student he built an early computer-vision system to classify cancer biopsy images. [2] After Cambridge he spent a year in Beijing studying Mandarin Chinese at Tsinghua University. [1]
In 2007 Hogarth co-founded Songkick, a concert-discovery service, with Michelle You and Pete Smith. The company took part in Y Combinator's 2007 programme and grew into a live-music platform that, by Hogarth's account, was used by around 15 million fans to follow favourite artists and find nearby shows. [1][2] He and Smith also co-founded Silicon Milkroundabout in 2010, a recruitment fair connecting London technology startups with engineers and designers. [1]
In June 2015 Songkick merged with CrowdSurge, an artist-ticketing company founded by Matt Jones in 2008, raising a funding round of about 16.6 million dollars; Hogarth and Jones became co-chief executives of the combined business. [1] Songkick pursued antitrust litigation against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, alleging anticompetitive conduct in the concert-ticketing market. In January 2018, shortly before trial, Ticketmaster settled for 130 million dollars, a record figure for such a case. [2][3] By then the company had been broken up: in 2017 the Songkick concert-discovery app and brand were sold to Warner Music Group, and the remaining ticketing assets were later sold to Live Nation. [3] Earlier recognition for Hogarth's work at Songkick included a place on Inc. magazine's "30 under 30" list and the British Council's UK Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year award, both in 2010, and a Forbes "30 under 30" listing in music in 2012. [1]
Alongside Songkick, Hogarth became an active angel investor with an early conviction that machine learning would become broadly commercial. Beginning around 2014 he backed more than 50 machine-learning startups; his personal portfolio has included Anthropic, the consumer-finance app Cleo, the conversation-analytics company Chorus.ai, the events platform Hopin, the defence-AI firm Helsing, and the medical-imaging company Kheiron Medical. [2]
In 2021 he co-founded the early-stage venture firm Plural, originally styled Plural Platform, together with the Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, the former Skype and Teleport executive Sten Tamkivi, and the investor Khaled Helioui. Plural launched publicly in June 2022 with a fund of 250 million euros aimed at European founders, and in January 2024 it raised a further fund of roughly 432 million dollars. [4][9] The partners describe themselves as "unemployables," experienced founders who invest in and work directly alongside the next generation of European technology companies. [4] Across his angel and Plural activity Hogarth has invested in more than 150 companies, including over 50 in artificial intelligence. [1] He also chairs Phasecraft, a quantum-computing startup. [2]
Since 2018 Hogarth has co-authored the annual State of AI Report with Nathan Benaich. Published each autumn, the report reviews the year's developments across research, industry, talent, compute, and AI safety, and has become one of the most widely read free summaries of progress in the field. [1][2] In June 2018 Hogarth also published an influential blog essay, "AI Nationalism," which argued that advances in machine learning would reshape geopolitics and push governments to treat AI capability as a strategic national asset. [1]
The table below summarises his principal roles.
| Period | Role | Organisation |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 to 2017 | Co-founder, later co-CEO | Songkick |
| 2010 | Co-founder | Silicon Milkroundabout |
| 2014 onward | Angel investor | 50+ machine-learning startups |
| 2018 onward | Co-author | State of AI Report |
| 2021 onward | Co-founder and partner | Plural (formerly Plural Platform) |
| 2023 onward | Founding chair | UK AI Safety Institute, later AI Security Institute |
In April 2023 Hogarth published a long personal essay in the Financial Times titled "We must slow down the race to God-like AI." In it he described the accelerating competition between leading laboratories to build ever more capable systems, warned that an eventual "God-like AI," a superintelligent system beyond meaningful human control, could pose catastrophic or even existential risks, and called for greater caution, regulation, and public oversight of the most advanced models. [6] The essay was widely shared and helped establish Hogarth as a credible, investor-side voice arguing for stronger AI safety measures. His position is one of conditional caution rather than a call to stop AI development outright: he has argued that society should capture the technology's benefits while building the institutions and evidence base needed to manage its most serious risks. [2][6]
On 18 June 2023 the UK government named Hogarth chair of its newly announced Foundation Model Taskforce, a body backed by an initial 100 million pounds and modelled in part on the country's Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce, with a remit to build national capability in frontier AI and to research its risks. [5] The taskforce was soon renamed the Frontier AI Taskforce, and in November 2023, around the AI Safety Summit that the UK hosted at Bletchley Park, it was established as the AI Safety Institute, an early example of a state-backed body dedicated to evaluating advanced AI, with Hogarth continuing as chair. [7]
The institute conducts technical evaluations of advanced AI models, frequently testing them before public release, and builds scientific evidence to inform government policy. On 14 February 2025 the government renamed it the AI Security Institute, sharpening its public framing toward serious risks with security implications, such as the potential misuse of AI to support chemical, biological, or cyber attacks, fraud, and child sexual abuse, while dropping a previously stated focus on issues such as bias and free speech. Hogarth, who remained chair, said the institute's "focus from the start has been on security and we've built a team of scientists focused on evaluating serious risks to the public." [8]
| Date | Body | Hogarth's role |
|---|---|---|
| 18 June 2023 | Foundation Model Taskforce | Chair |
| Late 2023 | Frontier AI Taskforce (renamed) | Chair |
| November 2023 | AI Safety Institute (launched around the Bletchley Park summit) | Chair |
| 14 February 2025 | AI Security Institute (renamed) | Chair |
As chair, Hogarth sets strategic direction while day-to-day leadership rests with the institute's director. As of 2026 he remains chair of the AI Security Institute, which sits within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and was led on an interim basis by director Adam Beaumont, a former chief AI officer at GCHQ. [11] Because his extensive AI investments could create conflicts of interest with his public role, Hogarth's outside interests have been formally declared and published by the government. [12]