The Autonomy Data Unit is the computational R&D wing of the Autonomy Institute. Six data scientists and machine-learning engineers who scrape, model, and read at a scale most newsrooms and unions cannot.
We build the evidence base for people who hold power to account: unions, charities, investigative journalists, campaigners. Frontier methods, movement values. Think of us as the data arm of the public interest.
Scrape filings, donations, contracts and the open web. LLMs pull out entities and links. We map who is connected to whom, then make the map readable.
Microsimulation, input-output models, bespoke indices. We turn a policy question into numbers a committee can argue with.
LLM extraction across millions of documents, turned into a dataset you can query. Annual reports, registers, planning files, court records.
Public-facing searchable databases, trackers and indexes. Built to be used by a journalist on deadline, not just admired in a slide.
An LLM pipeline that reads every UK annual report and surfaces the risk events companies actually confirmed: lawsuits, fraud, plant closures, regulatory hits. Updated continuously, searchable by anyone.
riskstobritishbusiness.today →| Ref | Project | Link |
|---|---|---|
| A-01 | The Authoritarian Stack Millions of pages scraped to map the modern far right and its links to power. | LIVE → |
| A-02 | Risks to British Business LLM pipeline reading every UK annual report to surface confirmed risk events. | LIVE → |
| A-03 | AI Exposure Index / 30M Job Adverts 30M job ads tagged with LLMs on the Isambard supercomputer, with the UK AI Security Institute. | CLIENT |
| A-04 | Givers & Takers Political donations linked to the government contracts that followed them. | LIVE → |
| A-05 | Labour, the Party of Capital? Labour's shift toward business donors, traced 2019 to 2024. | LIVE → |
| A-06 | Project 2025 Index AI-augmented index of the Heritage Foundation's 900-page plan for power. | LIVE → |
| A-07 | The Property Premium An economic model of UK landlord returns, built for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. | LIVE → |
| A-08 | Care Visa Sponsorship Database A searchable database of licensed care-visa sponsors, for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. | LIVE → |
| A-09 | Arts Funding Tracker Arts-council funding by constituency since 2014, built with the union Equity. | LIVE → |
| A-10 | Six Degrees of Reform Mapping the corporate connections of the UK's entrepreneurial far right. | LIVE → |
| A-11 | Corporate Underminers A co-mention network built for the ITUC, the global trade-union body. | CLIENT |
| A-12 | Jobs at Risk Index The origin project: UK workforce scored by Covid exposure, featured on Peston. | LIVE → |
A small team inside the Autonomy Institute. Six people, one register.
Data Unit
