Nathan Benaich is the founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, a London-based venture-capital firm focused on AI-first companies, and the lead author of the annual State of AI Report, which he has produced since 2018. The 2025 edition was the report's 8th. He also runs the Air Street Press Substack and the State of AI Compute Index.
Background and roles
Benaich founded Air Street Capital, a venture-capital firm focused on AI-first companies and based in London, where he serves as general partner. He has been the lead author and author-of-record of the State of AI Report since its first edition in 2018; the 8th annual edition appeared in October 2025 (State of AI Report 2025). Alongside the report he publishes the Air Street Press Substack and maintains the State of AI Compute Index.
The State of AI Report is one of the broadest industry-wide AI surveys, alongside the Stanford HAI AI Index. It is organized into Research, Industry, Politics, and Safety sections plus a large practitioner survey. Benaich's vantage point is venture-capital-adjacent, emphasizing commercialization, compute economics, and geopolitical positioning alongside research and safety.
Positions and statements
Benaich's framings in the report are generally bullish on commercialization and on Chinese fast-follow capability. He is skeptical that the institutionalization of AI safety has succeeded; the 2025 edition documents the collapse of the international AI Safety Institute network. He treats power and compute constraints as binding bottlenecks on the field's growth.
In the June 21, 2026 edition of his State of AI newsletter, Benaich argued that Europe "cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty," contending that a US directive able to disable access to a frontier model overnight makes control — not safety — the central question for European AI strategy and exposes the continent's dependence on American model providers (Source: nathanbenaich.substack.com). See AI Sovereignty.