Rishi Sunak, who served as UK Prime Minister from 2022 to 2024, took on senior advisory roles including Microsoft and Anthropic, The Guardian reports.
Letters of Parliament’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) office revealing Sunak’s appointments revealed concerns that the former Conservative prime minister’s insider information could “give Microsoft an unfair advantage”.
Sunak has some history with Microsoft, which has several active contracts with British government departments. In 2023, it revealed a £2.5bn deal with Microsoft to invest in new data centers and training in the UK.
Acoba too noted that “there is reasonable concern that his appointment could be seen as offering unfair access and influence within the UK government… given the ongoing debate about how best to regulate AI, and at a time of intense debate and lobbying around the world about what the approach should be.”
Sunak said he would refrain from advising on UK political issues, sticking to high-level perspectives on macroeconomic and geopolitical trends and avoiding lobbying. He said he would divert his salary to Project Richmond, a charity he founded with his wife earlier this year.
The former prime minister also serves as a senior advisor to investment bank Goldman Sachs and a speechwriter for companies including Bain Capital and Makena Capital.
Sunak is not the first British politician to take on roles helping Silicon Valley tech giants run government affairs. Sunak’s senior political adviser Liam Booth-Smith is also on Anthropic’s payroll. And former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg served as Meta’s president of global affairs until January 2025.
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In the United States, the revolving door between Silicon Valley and the US government is always on. At Meta, Clegg was replaced by Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, just as Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, joined the firm’s policy team in 2024. Microsoft’s current president of global affairs is Lisa Monaco, Joe Biden’s former deputy attorney general.
