BBFC awarded £1m grant to accelerate development of AI tool
October 22, 2025
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has received a grant of £988,856 from the UK Government to develop its AI compliance tool, Mira.
The UK Government’s Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) funds regulators and local authorities to trial new and innovative regulatory approaches enabling businesses to bring innovative products to the market quicker. In October 2025, through the Fourth Round of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, the RIO has awarded the BBFC a grant via the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund (RPF) to deliver the Mira project from proof-of-concept to user-ready.
For more than a century, the BBFC has been a guide for UK audiences – protecting children and vulnerable adults from harmful content, while helping people make informed viewing choices through age ratings and content advice. The development of Mira marks a new chapter. By exploring how AI can support and enhance its work, the BBFC says it is taking a significant step forward in ensuring its mission continues to meet the needs of audiences in an increasingly digital world.
Regulator built and backed, Mira is an AI-powered content scanning solution that redefines digital content reviews – automatically generating standardised, territory-agnostic compliance metadata at speed and scale to accelerate global content compliance. Mira’s metadata identifies the strength, severity and timing of compliance issues, helping the industry stay on top of compliance across all digital content from film to social media video. Mira enables age ratings and content moderation to scale in sync with growing global demand and will transform online content safety and classification.
Mira’s generation of rich metadata from scanning content saves time and resources on content reviews while enabling human oversight of a wider range of compliance issues. It combines speed with precision, reducing human error and bias by spotting details the human eye could miss while retaining essential human oversight to ensure decisions remain rooted in regulatory expertise.
The BBFC’s 12-month project commenced on October 1st and will conclude by September 30th 2026. The core focus of the project is the transition of Mira from a proof-of-concept into a user-ready, software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. Mira is one of three tools being developed under the BBFC Technology portfolio.
David Austin OBE, CEO of the BBFC, commented: “I am absolutely thrilled that the BBFC has been awarded nearly £1 million from the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund. Global content distribution has reached extraordinary levels and local compliance standards are constantly evolving. Only through embracing technology can the BBFC keep up with the challenge of protecting audiences. The funding is a huge help in harnessing the power of AI to innovate and better protect audiences online. As a regulator-created tool, Mira’s design is firmly rooted in robust regulatory principles and the BBFC’s public protection mandate. A user-ready Mira will establish the UK as a leader in global video regulatory innovation, creating a scalable product that reduces costs for the creative industry, while allowing content to be brought to market safely, legally, quickly, and affordably.”
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