AI Scenarios 2030 — UK Government Office for Science's Cross-Government Foresight Tool for AI Policy Stress-Testing

In April 2025, the UK's Government Office for Science (GO-Science) published AI Scenarios 2030, a foresight report built together with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the AI Security Institute (AISI) to help policymakers across Whitehall reason about a highly uncertain AI future.

Rather than forecasts, the scenarios are explicitly designed as stress-testing tools so departments can check whether existing policies and plans hold up under different AI trajectories; GO-Science positions them as 'a shared baseline for cross-government thinking on the future of AI.'

The team used a hybrid methodology of expert workshops, peer review and a General Morphological Analysis of six critical uncertainties (AI capability growth, model distribution and access, security and controllability, adoption and autonomy, labour-market displacement, and international cooperation) to build five internally consistent scenarios: Slow Burn, Open Frontier, Augmented Growth, Transformation Economy and Take-Off. The scenarios were refreshed in June 2026 and published under the Open Government Licence as part of the wider 'Frontier AI: Capabilities and Risks' series.

GOV.UK states the scenarios 'have been used across government to stress test policies' and are 'in regular demand,' though this is institutional testimony rather than a quantified outcome measure.

The approach is qualitative by design: its value lies in structuring debate and surfacing blind spots rather than producing a single quantified forecast, so its evidence base rests on institutionalisation and repeated reuse across departments rather than a performance metric.