OpenAI's Sam Altman, left, is a backer of Rain Neuromophics, one of the companies that received funds from the UK's Aria, the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, right OpenAI's Sam Altman, left, is a backer of Rain Neuromophics, one of the companies that received funds from the UK's Aria, the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, right Exclusive: Brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Aria is aimed at funding'crazy' scientific projects to benefit the UK Britain's "invention agency" has pledged £50m of UK taxpayer money to US tech companies and venture capital projects. Dreamed up by Dominic Cummings to fund "crazy" ideas, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) is meant to " restore Britain's place as a scientific superpower ". But a joint investigation by the Guardian and Democracy for Sale, an investigative website, has established that more than an eighth of the agency's £400m in research and development funding over the past two years has gone to 14 US tech companies and venture capital groups, in some cases, with no clear return for the UK or Aria. One of these companies, Rain Neuromorphics, is also backed by the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, and was reported to be near collapse last year, shortly after winning Aria money. It did not respond to a request for comment; two of its founders appear to have left the company.

At first glance, Demis Hassabis is an unusual figure for Dominic Cummings to have turned to for guidance in March 2020 about the threat of the novel coronavirus bearing down on the UK. The co-founder of Google subsidiary DeepMind, which is dedicated to high-level AI research, has a varied CV, but is no epidemiologist. A child chess prodigy, he hit the rank of master at 13 and was for a brief time the second-highest-rated player in the world in his age category. After completing his A-levels two years early, he joined video game studio Bullfrog, where he co-designed the hit classic Theme Park at just 17 years old, before leaving to study computer science at Cambridge. He returned to video game development for another decade, and, after switching back to academia and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, founded DeepMind in 2011. In the decade since, during which DeepMind was sold to Google for £400m, the company has worked on a number of healthcare problems.

The COVID-19 public health crisis is enriching a murky nexus of technology surveillance firms linked to senior Government officials – at the expense of people's lives. The financial adventures of a former MI5 spymaster and the medical fantasies of Boris Johnson's top advisor point toward an unnerving endgame: an artificially intelligent (AI) corporate super-state, with a special focus on NHS genetic research inspired by eugenics. The tale begins with Britain's security services – and ends with Dominic Cummings. It uncovers the extent to which democracy and public health are now under threat from a series of Government failures rooted in a bankrupt ideology, influenced by the modern relics of scientific racism. On Sunday 12 April, the Government announced that the NHS would be launching a new COVID-19 contact tracing app.

Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to UK prime minister Boris Johnson, has said he wants the UK government to hire "weirdos and misfits with odd skills" to apply science to the civil service. While primarily a quirky job ad, his blog post also offers a glimpse into how he sees scientific research transforming the government. As well as listing categories of people he would like to hire – including mathematicians and physicists – the blog post also focuses on the utility of data science, artificial intelligence and the "science of prediction". But does his vision make sense? Can policy-making really be improved by building digital models of reality, or applying machine-learning to government data, as Cummings appears keen on?

Boris Johnson's most senior aide, Dominic Cummings, is facing conflict of interest accusations over a consultancy role he undertook for a government-endorsed healthcare startup that is in position to receive a share of a new £250m flagship public fund. Cummings advised Babylon Health, a controversial artificial intelligence (AI) firm working within the NHS, on its communications strategy and its senior recruitment, an investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. A GP app developed by the company was later backed publicly on multiple occasions by the health secretary, Matt Hancock. The former Vote Leave campaign director's formal role with Babylon concluded in July last year but he continued to advise the firm about recruitment until September 2018 – the same month Hancock visited the firm and told staff he wanted the NHS to help the company expand. In August this year, shortly after Boris Johnson entered No 10 with Cummings as his top adviser, Downing Street and the Department of Health announced a £250m fund to boost the use of AI in the NHS by using automated systems for diagnoses or data analysis.