They moved AI to the centre of government last week. I went looking for the half that watches what it does to you.

Last week the government moved artificial intelligence to the centre of British government, and I mean that literally. There is now an Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and inside it an AI Taskforce chaired by Lord Vallance, who reports directly to the Prime Minister. There is an AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, who attends Cabinet, which has not happened before. The AI Security Institute has moved in alongside them. The Cabinet Office has taken the lead on AI adoption across the Civil Service.

I have no complaint about any of that. If you think this technology matters, putting it at the top table is the coherent thing to do.

What I went looking for was the other half.

In January, the previous administration set up something called the AI and the Future of Work Unit. It sat in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Its job was to research and monitor what AI is doing to the economy and the labour market, and to advise on when policy should change. Its expert panel included Diane Coyle, Daniel Susskind, Mike Clancy of the Prospect union and Abigail Gilbert of the Institute for the Future of Work. It published a first assessment in January which found that hiring has been falling faster in the occupations most exposed to AI, and said plainly that whether AI is the cause of that is not yet clear.

That unit is the closest thing this country has to an answer to the question this paper exists to ask.

The department it sat in no longer exists.

So I went to find out where it went. I want to be careful about what I found, because it is a smaller thing than it might sound and I am not going to sell it as bigger.

The official account of what moved where runs to three documents: a written ministerial statement on 21 July, made in the Lords on the Prime Minister's behalf, a Cabinet Office fact sheet on 22 July, and a press release on 24 July naming Lord Vallance.

Three AI functions are named as going to the Cabinet Office: AI strategy, public sector AI adoption, and the AI Security Institute. Every one of those is about going faster.

The AI and the Future of Work Unit is not named in any of them.

Then I read the fact sheet to the end. Its final section carries the heading "Redistribution of the responsibilities of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology across other departments". Underneath it sits one paragraph explaining that technology and innovation are the foundation of all future industry, culture and public service delivery. Then the document finishes.

The section about where the department's responsibilities went does not list any of them.

Now the caveats, and there are three, and I would rather you had them from me than found them yourself.

The first is that I cannot prove a negative. I can tell you the Unit is not named in the documents whose stated purpose is to say what moved. I cannot tell you that nobody anywhere has said. If somebody has, we will print it and correct this.

The second is that the innocent reading may well be the true one. "AI strategy" is a wide phrase. The Unit may have walked into the Cabinet Office inside it and nobody thought the name worth typing. That is entirely possible and I am not claiming otherwise.

The third is the one I cannot put down. The Commons rose on 16 July and does not return until 1 September. Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July. Every one of these documents was published with MPs not sitting. That is circumstance and not contrivance: the handover was timed by somebody else's resignation, and the statement went properly to the Lords, which was still sitting. But it means no MP can stand up and ask where the Unit went until September, and by September it will be six weeks old and will not be news.

This is the Westminster Gap in its plainest form, and it belongs to nobody in particular. The Unit was created by one administration in January and left unplaced by the next in July. Nobody on that bench has asked the question. Neither, as far as I can find, has anybody in the press.

Here is why I care about this more than about an organisation chart.

A government that is accelerating adoption and measuring the consequences is doing something defensible. A government that is accelerating adoption and has lost track of the measuring is doing something else. The difference between those two is one sentence in a document, and that sentence has not been written.

Ines has the pattern below, and it is worse than I expected. This would be at least the third British body set up to examine the effects of technology that has been folded into a larger team and had its name retired. James has the January assessment itself, including the line where the Unit says it intends to publish updates subject to agreement across government, which Ada then takes apart.

This is a question for the Cabinet Office, and I am not going to pretend we have asked it and been stonewalled. We have not asked yet. What I can tell you is that the published record does not answer it, and that a reader who went looking this morning would end up exactly where we did.

— M.

*This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.*