AI Regulation Bill

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the case for a cross-sector AI regulation bill.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to bring this QSD to the Grand Committee for debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register, variously as adviser to the Crown Estate, Endava plc and Simmons and Simmons LLP. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak, and I look forward to their quick-fire contributions.

I have been given eight minutes to open this debate, but I can do it in one word: is there a case for a cross-sector AI Bill? Yes. To expand somewhat on that, the Prime Minister has described AI as:

“The defining opportunity of our generation”,

yet the Government are largely taking a wait-and-see, voluntary and so-called domain-specific approach. I am not sure that wait and see is ever an optimal approach to any issue, particularly one as significant as AI. But do not listen to me; let us consider, on its own merits, how the Government’s approach is going. Harms are unaddressed. Young people are not getting shortlisted for jobs, without even knowing that it is AI that is kicking them out of the process; even if they knew, there would be little, if any, redress at this time. Job seekers, benefit claimants, teachers and teenagers are all suffering the harms of AI that are currently unaddressed. Similarly, vast opportunities are being unoptimised for the UK. Wait and see has really led to partial, piecemeal and voluntary action.

Why have the Government taken this approach? Let us take just two of the elements that are offered. The first is that it is too soon to legislate; they will stymie, stifle or stop progress. Not a bit of it—we know exactly what we need to do to put in place the right-sized legislation and regulation. The second is a falsehood that recurs with tedious inevitability: you can either have regulation or innovation, but you cannot have both. We all know bad regulation—there is a deal of it about—but that does not mean for one second that regulation, of itself, is bad. Right-sized and right-touch regulation is good for citizens, creatives, consumers, innovators and investors alike. We know how to do this. Just look back to the telco regulation of some decades ago. Was it stopping an industry? Far from it: it was a key enabler of Great British telco business.

My Lords, my first duty is to thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for that introduction. He and I are members of the Lords Communications and Digital Committee. We have both benefited from discussions and hearings about AI held by the Select Committee under the shrewd guidance of our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley.

Our briefings seemed to come from two directions. First, the tech sector sees the onward march to artificial intelligence to be a unique opportunity to achieve unprecedented leaps in productivity, problem-solving and efficiency—the very combination of which successive Governments have been seeking since the great financial crash of 2008. There are counterarguments, coming mainly from the creative industries and from people such as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, who see the risks and dangers associated with AI as enough to give us pause before we decide on the direction to take.

If the AI revolution is already on the way—I believe it is—our first task is to ensure that our machinery of government is fit for purpose. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, suggested a cross-sector AI Bill. I would go further and establish a cross-party, pre-legislative scrutiny committee of both Houses to take evidence on the proposals in such a Bill. I was on the committee for the Communications Act 2003. It was one of the great experiences of my life, in exchanging and hearing ideas.

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for securing this debate. I will echo some of his themes.

Cross-sectoral regulation will come. The question is simply: when? This week, the Trump Administration issued an executive order compelling new AI frontier models to be submitted for review. All general-purpose technologies require regulation—electricity, rail and nuclear. Like nuclear, AI is both a general-purpose technology and a dual-use one. But unlike early nuclear, AI innovation is occurring in private companies and not in government labs, which partly explains the regulatory squeamishness. The US fears falling behind China; the UK fears impeding growth and points to Europe, where regulation has damaged innovation. As the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, into this debate stepped the Pope, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and a host of lesser luminaries, including the head of MI5, the founders of Anthropic and military chiefs—all agitating for action both locally and nationally.

Regulation is not antithetical to growth and to realising the upsides of AI. The Government are delivering cross-sectoral legislation on cybersecurity but have hesitated on a comparable approach to AI safety. I invite the Minister, when summing up, to share when the Government will launch their consultation on AI regulation. Will they consider regulation at the point of development and not simply at the point of use? Will they mandate pre-deployment testing of high-risk AI, as the US has now done? Do they accept the case for an AI regulatory oversight body?

These are robust questions for my own Government. Yet these issues are too big for us to play politics with. I note that I am to be followed by the noble Lord, Lord Harper, who is unquestionably the master of robust challenge. Yet his Government also wrestled with the growth versus regulation dilemma; Rishi Sunak counselled caution as recently as last week about us being a first mover. I welcome the call of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for a cross-party approach. The nation and the world are looking to us for actions that match our moment. This requires an inclusive discussion, debate and direction. It is time to act.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Holmes for securing this debate, which has given us the opportunity, albeit briefly, to talk about this subject. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, for what I think was intended as a kind remark.

I support a principles-based approach, which is not surprising since that was the approach set out by the Government of which I was a member. A number of principles should be adopted by existing regulators—I do not support having a single AI regulator—balanced against their existing duties on growth and innovation. This is important because, while there are absolutely risks with AI, it will be one of the biggest potential drivers of growth and innovation if we get it right. We need to balance those two things.

I also want to focus on the thing that we are doing well—the AI Security Institute, which we set up and the current Government have retained. I was listening to Matt Clifford the other day, an apolitical official who is experienced in this sector. He was brought in by Rishi Sunak and retained by the present Prime Minister. He made the point that this is world leading, enabling us to robustly test AI models and approaches to make sure that we deal with the risks. It is very successful at enabling us to be a global leader. We are never going to be like the United States, the centre of all these things, but outside of the US and China we are a leading player in this area.

I support a principles-based approach and a relatively short piece of legislation that would give the duty to existing regulators to adopt those principles. However, we need to move at pace and not do what happened with the Online Safety Act—still talking about the legislation in seven years’ time, when, frankly, the world will have moved on at pace.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, on his commitment to AI regulation and on securing today’s QSD. In the time available, I will follow the noble Lord, Lord Harper, and concentrate on AISI, the AI Security Institute.

When Claude Mythos Preview was released by Anthropic to a select group of launch partners a few weeks ago, AISI was the only non-American government organisation to receive access to the model for safety testing. However, should the UK Government in three years’ time have the same view of AI governance as the current US President, AISI’s future would be under threat. The Government could decide overnight to repurpose it or even shut it down altogether.

I therefore proposed a Private Member’s Bill, not drawn in the ballot, which would establish AISI as an independent statutory body. It would make provision for its functions in relation to the testing and evaluation of advanced AI systems, including pre-deployment and post-deployment assessment of risks, and for the institute to give advice to the Government and Parliament. Putting AISI on a statutory footing, beyond its current status as a unit within DSIT, would signal to the international community that the UK’s commitment to AI safety was permanent.

We cannot wait: Anthropic is predicting that there is a greater than 50% probability that AI self-recursive improvement will be achieved by 2028. If AISI has become an independent statutory body by then, it will be able to provide regulatory advice on whether AI designed by AI is safe to use or whether it should be banned in the UK. Expert-driven regulation based on advice from an independent AISI, using Henry VIII powers if required, is the best option for AI safety in the UK. I urge the Minister and the Government to allocate some bandwidth to thinking about this critical issue.

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Holmes for bringing this debate. The fact that so many of us wish to speak today shows that this really needs to be properly debated as a society, not just in a series of two-minute soundbites.

I think we all agree that good regulation and economic growth are not a trade-off—they go hand in hand. In order to get good regulation, you have to go through quite detailed and thoughtful work. My question—I have asked the Minister this before in a Question—is: why are the Government not initiating a commission along the lines of the Warnock committee that looked at human embryology and fertilisation in the 1980s?

This single hour shows that there are really important moral, social and economic issues about AI that we need to think through. With the greatest of respect to my noble friend beside me, I genuinely do not think that individual regulators on their own can sort that out. We have to have a proper societal debate about this, and we have the democratic tools to do it. That is not a hurried piece of emergency legislation; it is a proper commission, a Green Paper and a White Paper. It is about building the societal trust that we need for this ground-breaking regulation.

I urge the Government to think carefully, because at the moment we are doing nothing, and that is really dangerous. Nothing takes us to the same place that we are in with social media, which is a huge amount of harm done, no action and then calls to ban the technology. Banning the technology is a really bad idea; regulating it well is where we should be going.

I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on securing this debate. Given the pace of AI development, it could not be more timely. As Pope Leo said in his recent encyclical:

“Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible”.

Regulation does not of necessity stifle innovation. As David Epstein argues in his recent book Inside the Box, creativity, innovation and problem-solving are often improved by constraints rather than exhortations to “think outside the box”. The need for regulation in this space, however, goes well beyond this. One cannot divorce current technological advances from the moral framework which underlies them. Every advance reflects a moral vision and an ideological bias. There is—in some quarters of the AI industry at least—a dehumanising conviction that evolution drives us towards perfection. AI, it is argued, will be better than us at many things, so why not harvest the best of us and move on? As recent debates about social media use by under-16s demonstrate, large technology companies motivated exclusively by profit do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. Such utilitarianism is not a basis for a human ethical framework.

Regulation is ultimately about the restraint of such power for the common good. There are underlying systems which power many of the applications with which we are familiar, and it is these that need to be regulated. As many noble Lords have said, it is insufficient to do this piecemeal by sector when the risks that experts warn about are not sector specific. They are systemic, and potentially catastrophic. Noble Lords in this debate have already suggested many methodologies for bringing that into practice. I urge His Majesty’s Government, in collaboration with other nations, to introduce guardrails at the point of development.

My Lords, I declare my interests as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group and chairman of the News Media Association. The vast, unaccountable technology companies would have us believe that any attempt at regulation in this area would stifle their growth and damage the economy. That is nonsense, of course. The truth is that legislation, even of the most modest sort, is long overdue to protect public safety, ensure transparency, tame untrammelled market power and protect content and intellectual property.

I have two points. First, there is already legislation on the statute book that, as a starting point, simply needs to be enforced. Rather than trying to rip the guts out of the CMA, the Government should actively direct it to encourage greater competition in digital markets. Google’s announcement yesterday that it will give publishers greater control over use of their work globally, after the CMA introduces binding conduct requirements on search, not only demonstrates that big tech will not flee if we introduce proportionate regulation but shows that the UK has an opportunity to lead the way.

Secondly, the Government should act now to ensure that existing copyright law is meaningfully enforced. For news publishers, indeed all content publishers, whose content is routinely scraped—or stolen—without consent or remuneration, simple transparency over the identity and purpose of the “crawlers” accessing that content would provide the basic information required to assert their rights and be rewarded for them. It is not a radical demand and falls well short of proper regulation, but it would be a start as a practical measure to make existing law effective. Yet even this has been kicked into the long grass, despite consistent demands from this House for action.

We should not accept political paralysis on this vital issue. AI can be a great force for good but, to serve all of society, laws must be enforced and fresh regulation put in place at speed. Unless we act now, history will taunt us with its most feared words: “too late”.