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UK launches “police.ai”, but does it own the domain?

Kevin Murphy, January 26, 2026, Domain Policy

The UK’s increasingly authoritarian government this afternoon announced extensive policing reforms, including what it called “Police.ai”.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood, speaking in Parliament in the last couple of hours, announced a new National Police Service and a substantial ramping up of live facial recognition technology for law enforcement in England and Wales.

“At the same time, we will launch Police.ai, investing a record £115 million in AI and automation to make policing more effective and efficient, stripping admin away to ensure officer time can be devoted to the human factor,” she added.

Police.ai appears to be the brand for a new “National Centre for AI in Policing”. But does the UK government actually own the domain police.ai? It appears not.

The domain NX’s for me, and registry Whois reveals it is registered to blockeddomains@gov.ai — that is, the Government of Anguilla, which still owns the .ai ccTLD even if Identity Digital manages it.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK government could obtain the domain, but it seems that so far it has not.

Announcing a broad, expensive, liberties-threatening, technology-driven program of policing reform while making such a basic branding error looks at face value like a worrying lack of technical nous.

The police press release announcing the project appears to have been yanked, but a Home Office white paper (pdf) goes into more detail about the plan.