My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords taking part in this debate. I pay particular tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for his leadership in advocating for digital systems to reflect our ethics and values, who today makes his valedictory speech.
Anyone who has heard me speak about technology over the past 15 years could be forgiven for thinking that I do not much like it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love what technology makes possible. I rely on it for my health; I use artificial intelligence every day; and I still marvel that I can speak face to face with people on the other side of the world as though they were in the room. My criticism has never been of what technology can do, but rather of the political and economic choices that we have allowed to shape its development.
Technology is not an independent force that arrives from nowhere. It reflects the interests, incentives and values of those who build it, finance it and control it. Technology now underpins every area of public and private life, so digital policy is no longer simply about innovation, information or efficiency. It is a constitutional issue that raises serious questions about sovereignty, including whether Governments retain the practical ability to govern in the interests of their own citizens. That is why I secured this debate. At heart, sovereignty is the capacity to choose. Sovereignty means that Parliament makes the laws, government governs, regulators regulate and courts enforce our law, and that Britain is free to pursue its national interest without coercion or dependence. Yet we have allowed that capacity to be eroded by the tech sector in four distinct ways.
My Lords, we stand today at a moment of profound vulnerability for the United Kingdom. Our economic security, our national safety and even our long-term sovereignty are at massive risk because we do not yet host or own enough of our own computing infrastructure, our own cloud services or our own advanced AI capabilities. By relying so heavily on foreign businesses and Governments far from our shores, we leave ourselves exposed to the possibility of remote disablement, restriction or withdrawal of the very systems that our society, our public services and our businesses increasingly depend on.
Today, the UK relies almost entirely on American and Chinese companies for the most capable AI models. Recent events, including the United States restricting access to one of Anthropic’s most advanced systems, show how fragile that dependence is. In a world where AI increasingly underpins economic growth and national security, Britain must develop homegrown capabilities. Yes, we have a sovereign AI fund, but it is just a fraction of what our neighbours are pursuing. Other nations are already building sovereign AI systems at scale. The United States, China and the European Union are investing billions into domestic computing infrastructure, national-level model development and secure AI infrastructure. France has launched a sovereign AI initiative centred on national cloud and compute capacity, the UAE is developing its own frontier-led models, and countries such as Japan, South Korea and India are rapidly expanding state-backed AI ecosystems.
My Lords, it is time for the formal and ritual congratulations to the noble Baroness, Kidron, not merely on starting the debate but for recognising her enormous energy, concentration and focus on the real issues, which I am glad we are debating now at the end of this term. Of course, the key issue is who holds power and how on earth, in the new conditions in which power is shifting all the time, we will maintain some control—the noble Baroness who has just spoken rightly reminded us of this—over areas that we can realistically control, rather than pursuing hopes and slogans that would only raise hopes when nothing can be done.
I say, incidentally, that the slogan “Take back control” is one of the silliest, most immature and most useless slogans that has been thrown into the political debate over the last decade or so. That is not the question; it gives us no guidance as to how on earth we establish the new powers, how we can contribute to them, or how we retain the areas where sovereignty has obviously been completely changed and partly dissolved from what existed 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Where does it lie now? It lies increasingly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others know perfectly well, with the great platforms—I am not sure whether it is the four American ones, the two or three Chinese ones or other platforms that are emerging. We try our best in some areas, but it is with the platforms that the power exists. The question is how on earth we are to identify areas where we can retain maximum influence internationally as well as retaining our own systems much more efficiently than we do.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for facilitating this debate on such an important topic. It is, as always, a pleasure to follow my noble friend, who makes such thoughtful contributions.
I want to concentrate on artificial intelligence. As I think we all know, alongside magnificent opportunities, it presents many risks. The greatest of those risks is not intelligence or what the technology can do, but the concentration of power in too few companies, in too few countries and, ultimately, in too few hands. We have seen the consequences—the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has talked about some of them—when digital markets become dominated by a small number of powerful platforms: reduced competition, weaker innovation and increased dependency.
The question, therefore, is not whether concentration of power matters—it plainly does—but how we respond. I share with many noble Lords the concern that the UK should not become dependent on a handful of foreign tech companies for critical digital capabilities, but I am not convinced that the answer is more regulation. The largest and most dominant frontier model developers benefit if Governments believe that only they can be allowed to develop safely the most powerful AI. They benefit from a resulting policy debate in which ever greater risks are assumed to require ever greater regulation. That, to me, is the real danger of regulatory capture. Regulation introduced in the name of safety can become a barrier to entry that protects today’s dominant platforms from tomorrow’s competitors.
My Lords, my congratulations and gratitude go to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate. Though it feels like we have an almost weekly debate in your Lordships’ House on one aspect or another of AI, I think it is most welcome, given that this is one of the most concerning, unregulated areas that affects our daily lives, and is likely to remain so in the future. Nevertheless, there has been little debate about how our national sovereignty is being slowly eroded, in real time, by those who control our data, our infrastructure and our algorithms. Most worryingly, they are not bound by our laws. I believe we are standing at a critical crossroads.
As we have heard from noble Lords who spoke before me, not controlling our own digital destiny risks our becoming a digital colony of the American monopolies and being subject to powers who are, let us say, our fleeting friends. That is why I strongly welcome Prime Minister Burnham’s decision to bring the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to the Cabinet table. This structural promotion signals and recognises that artificial intelligence is the very foundation of our future national security and public services, ensuring economic growth. However, while this is a welcome change, our defensive and regulatory framework remains dangerously behind the curve. Building fences for the large language models of today could mean being completely defenceless against the autonomous threats of tomorrow.
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, and I add to the plaudits directed at the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has prosecuted her agenda on digital safety and digital rights for more than a decade with acute skill and has certainly moved the dial on many occasions. May I also say how pleased I am that the Minister has survived the reshuffle cull? As she knows, I had a small desire that she would move to the environment department, so that we could refer to her as Baroness Lloyd of Effra of Defra, but we will have to wait. And may I say how sad I am that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, has left the Government? She was an absolutely excellent Minister. I declare my interest as an adviser to Digital Futures, which deploys AI engineers into companies and assesses their AI capabilities.
In November, the House of Lords Science and Tech Committee described the UK tech economy as an incubator economy. More recently, Amanda Brock from OpenUK made the point that we should not seek, when we talk about AI sovereignty, to build the whole AI tech stack by ourselves. Somewhere between those two statements lies the way forward, because we are in an interconnected world: we cannot simply ignore the rest of the world, but we must do better than be the incubator economy we have been for so many years. We must support British companies to scale and grow in this area.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate and for a powerful and incisive introduction which rightly identified that what we are talking about today is a constitutional issue—among the many that the British state currently faces, which has a lot to do with the state of Britain today. Governments must be able to make decisions and laws for the good of the British people, not for the profits of a few foreign Governments or at the behest of a capricious foreign regime.
That is not what is happening in the digital area. As the noble Baroness outlined, and others have referred to, we see a situation where decisions are made once. A contract is awarded in a choice between two or maybe three giant companies out of the handful that might have put in for it. Then we are locked in, unable to go anywhere else because the costs of changing horses would be too great.
We must acknowledge that the UK has a terrible record on sovereignty. This is not an isolated issue, and here I respectfully entirely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The slogan “Take back control” in the last decade showed that the public understood this problem very clearly. That concern was entirely misdirected—it was directed to the east when it perhaps should have been directed to the west—but none the less the public could see the problem that was arising. Another example which fits nicely with this is the issue of secret courts for ISDS—investor-state dispute settlement procedures. A study from April said that the UK was the worst among European countries in empowering this profoundly undemocratic procedure that stops Governments making decisions in the interests of their people.
My Lords, I refer to my membership of a number of APPGs on digital inclusion. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing this debate today. Like her, I am not against technology, AI or any of the platforms that exist. However, I worry about the numbers of people who remain excluded from being able to utilise it for their own knowledge and protection. That is why I wanted to speak in this debate.
A few days ago, I was watching a television programme about two types of intelligence: artificial intelligence and latent or civilizational intelligence, which we as human beings have had over centuries in our capacity to learn, to retain and to pass on. It made me think about this debate today. While we can talk about the wider implications of a few companies having such an impact on us in the UK and more widely, it made me think about it being a new form of colonisation across the world, one in which there is very little power in the hands of leaders who do not have access to the complex technologies that exist in only a very few countries on the planet. While we are very keen to cut down the time it takes to get answers, it also removes the ability for a large majority of people to be part of a debate in which they can fully question what is happening to them.
The role of government and Houses such as this is to scrutinise what we are going to deliver and lay out for the majority of the population of the country we serve. I felt quite helpless when I thought about the large part of our country that still has very little access to even basic technology—let alone trying to understand the complexities of artificial intelligence—all the companies that are going to utilise their platforms and our data, and the defence mechanisms that we hold individually but lose because suddenly we have abdicated our power to someone else.
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First, we have surrendered political leverage: on copyright, where the Government put their proposed UK-US technology deal above our own copyright law— a deal that, incidentally, never materialised; on child safety, where, as the former Minister Jess Phillips observed, it took a year simply to persuade the Government just to threaten legislation, not to legislate; and on data protection, competition policy and consumer protection, and across government departments, where public lobbying and private pressure have urged officials not to upset the Americans.
That pressure is increasingly reinforced by an activist White House. We are threatened with sanctions for any policy that might impact on US tech. The US tech sector is uniquely concentrated in a small number of companies and beholden to the views of a small number of powerful funders who possess dual-class shares that give them total control. They tell us that Britain will be left behind, that innovation and growth depend on abandoning our own laws, or that complying with them is technically unfeasible. That is very hard to take from companies that promise immortality and colonies on Mars—the very same companies that insisted that age assurance, two-factor authentication and the right to be forgotten would break the internet. Backed by unprecedented wealth and unparalleled political access, they have exercised extraordinary influence over government policy.
Secondly, we have surrendered economic leverage. For years, we have tolerated economic arrangements that place British businesses at a structural disadvantage. Our high streets pay taxes that e-commerce does not, black taxis are subject to obligations while ride-hailing is not, hotels meet standards that short-term letting platforms do not—each is a transfer of wealth overseas. The Government have poured billions of pounds of public money into global technology companies, while British firms that employ people here, pay taxes here and invest here—and, importantly, train the next generation—struggle to gain a foothold in public procurement.
An investigation in last week’s London Review of Books describes how, after years of recruiting former officials and consultants with access to Ministers and senior decision-makers, Palantir secured its position at the heart of the NHS, culminating in a £330 million contract for its federated data platform. Many trusts either have chosen not to use it at all or regard it as inferior to cheaper alternatives. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust warned that it would
“lose functionality rather than gain it”,
while NHS Greater Manchester said that its own system
“exceeds anything the FDP currently offers”.
The issue is not only quality or value of money but that, over time, the NHS will become bound to Palantir: it will continue to own its own data but will depend on Palantir’s software to use it. Similarly, the Ministry of Defence admits that replacing one of its Palantir systems
“would involve rebuild of the underlying data analytics architecture”.
That is not simply vendor lock-in; it is a strategic dependency at the heart of our national security. Choice exists in theory but increasingly disappears in practice. Palantir is not unique. Across Whitehall, the same pattern is emerging in cloud computing, enterprise software and artificial intelligence. Sovereignty is not simply the freedom to make a decision; it is the freedom to make a different decision in the future.
Thirdly, we have surrendered technological capability. Every procurement decision is also an investment decision. Buying technology elsewhere means investing in someone else’s industrial future rather than our own. I have spoken to sources in health, defence and policing, who all told me they had been forced to contract AWS because no UK cloud provider was considered financially secure. Yet when I asked whether the combined purchasing power of government could itself create financial resilience for a British provider, the answer was an unqualified yes. Parliament has already provided tools to the competition regulator to challenge entrenched digital market power. The problem is not legislative capacity but political strategy. Cloud computing is only one example. The same logic applies wherever government buys technology. Procurement does not simply purchase capability; it determines where future capability is built.
Fourthly, we have created strategic vulnerability: from Microsoft, which suspended services used by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and refused to answer questions from Police Scotland about where sensitive law enforcement data was being processed; to Elon Musk withdrawing Starlink access from Ukraine’s military operations; President Trump’s decision to limit access to AI models Fable and Mythos 5 to US nationals only; and this week’s news that an OpenAI agent has autonomously hacked Hugging Face, just weeks after OpenAI’s chief executive argued that frontier AI should be regulated under US leadership. The US has no such regulatory regime, and the risks are imminent.
Together, these reveal the problem of allowing critical public capacity to depend entirely on infrastructure controlled offshore. I fear that those who argue that Britain must wait for global agreement are whistling in the wind. History suggests that meaningful international regulation follows major incidents rather than prevents them. Meanwhile, across government, hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure, and security and intelligence communities, we are replacing technologies whose risks we broadly understand with systems whose capabilities and failures remain, at best, uncertain. A nation that depends on decisions beyond the reach of its own Parliament and Government and its own regulators and courts has, in practice, surrendered its sovereignty.
We have a new Government, and that is an opportunity to lead. Britain begins from a position of enormous strength. We have world-leading universities, exceptional scientists, some of the richest and most trusted datasets in the world in the NHS, the BBC, the Met Office and beyond, and institutions, such as the AI Security Institute, that have demonstrated international leadership. These are not simply public services; they are strategic national assets that we could capitalise on to drive prosperity and independence across some of the technology stack—from AI and quantum to specialist models, medical advances, infrastructure and even a new media environment.
During the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Bill, I argued that these unique datasets should be formally categorised as sovereign datasets. Those working at the frontier of artificial intelligence accept that high-quality data is the scarce resource of the future, but it is a resource that we have in abundance. That is why my noble friend Lord Tarassenko has repeatedly argued that Britain should develop a publicly supported foundation model, so that data generated by the British people continues to create value for Britain. The objective is not to build the world’s largest model. Systems that may or may not be sentient and that foment unemployment for half the world’s population, with no corresponding plan for humankind, are Silicon Valley’s vision, not ours. The objective is to build models that are responsible and trusted, trained on known data, capable of audit, secure by design and, most of all, tailored to the needs of British businesses, public services, legal frameworks and security requirements. A trusted AI ecosystem also requires robust systems of transparency that protect our national security and present an opportunity for licensing at scale.
Government must get off the fence. Companies that refuse to respect British intellectual property should not expect access to public contracts. Britain should create conditions for its intellectual property to be licensed and commercialised across the global economy.
It is time for government procurement to support British values and build national capability: a “sovereign as service” unit across government, promoting British business, including SMEs, enabling pre-authorised procurement and ensuring that public money develops future skills and capability. We want procurement that rewards openness, interoperability, competition and genuine exit strategies, so that the Government never again mistake convenience for resilience or political access for innovation. They should always ask, “Efficient for whom?”—not just whether savings are made but where value is created and where it stays, so that public spending strengthens regional and household prosperity, not simply the market cap of overseas firms. Above all, government contracts should go only to companies that commit to respecting British law.
Finally, we must transform sovereignty from a strapline into a measurable strategy. Ministers speak about reducing strategic dependence, increasing resilience and retaining leverage. They have spoken about building British capability and working with trusted partners. Yet in practice they have pursued the logic of dependence, buying, subsidising and valorising foreign technology, in the belief that being close to power is the same as exercising it. It is not.
I have been working with colleagues at the British Computer Society to develop a national sovereignty dashboard so that we have objective measures of resilience, dependency and capability. Governments already measure inflation, productivity, emissions and debt, because what gets measured gets managed. To ensure sovereignty, we must have a way of measuring it. France, Switzerland, India, Brazil, UAE and South Korea have all made sovereign decisions about aspects of their technology infrastructure. They are investing in their capability and simultaneously protecting their future security. For too long, our approach has been subservient to the lobbying trope that all but America and China are too late. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live outside those two superpowers, and tech multilateralism offers the UK a powerful role.
Sovereignty never meant doing everything ourselves; it means retaining the freedom choose now and to make another decision tomorrow. Sovereignty is not protectionism; it is statecraft. There is a different sovereign future available to Britain, built on capability, confidence, trusted systems, respectful partnerships and, above all, the capacity to choose. I beg to move.
Here in the UK, we have one of the largest and richest bodies of public data anywhere in the world, not least from our NHS. As the cost of building capable AI systems continues to fall, we have a genuine opportunity to harness that data for ourselves, to help clinicians reach diagnoses faster, and to build public services that reflect our own standards and accountability, rather than simply adopting whatever the market happens to offer us.
But we must also confront the elephant in the room: leading AI companies are racing towards superintelligence, despite acknowledging that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. Sovereign AI is absolutely critical, but it is worth investing in only if other AI models can be kept under control. As we welcome our new Prime Minister, there is a danger that could overshadow all his important goals: the real possibility that advanced AI systems become uncontrollable. How the incoming leadership chooses to approach AI risk will shape our entire future.
Over 120 parliamentarians so far have called for superintelligent AI to be formally recognised as a national and global security threat. I am one of them. Simply put, the UK must lead an international agreement to prohibit the development of superintelligence until it can be proven safe. If we fail, every other ambition for our country risks being swept aside. The clock is ticking. Some AI systems already exceed human abilities in narrow domains, such as Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold. In June, the director of the US National Security Agency revealed that Anthropic’s Mythos model identified vulnerabilities in classified systems. This should be a wake-up call for every Government, including ours.
We are only just beginning to see a shift in the West towards an appetite for government action. At the recent G7 summit, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind both called for a US-led standards body to test the cutting-edge frontier AI models for national security threats. But there is no indication that this is actually coming—and there are agitators that we should all be aware of. It was only this week on X that President Trump’s former AI adviser, David Sacks, called for “permissionless innovation”.
Building more of our AI at home is vital to our security and our economy, but none of it will count for anything unless humans stay in charge. The day that someone builds a true superintelligence or we lose our grip on a powerful AI system, that sovereignty is gone. This week—in fact, just the other day—we witnessed a taste of what happens when humans lose control: the unintended and unprecedented accidental cyber attack by the new GPT-5.6 Sol and other models on the very platform that was hosting a test. Perhaps it should concern us all that that did not make some of the front pages of our newspapers.
This debate shines a spotlight on something vital for our country: that building sovereign AI capacity is absolutely essential. But, if any nation or company builds a true superintelligence without guardrails, that sovereignty disappears everywhere. We need urgent action to develop our own models to ensure that we have rapid investment in our own AI infrastructure for our economy, for our security and for our resilience. But we also need urgent action to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI until scientific consensus shows us that it can be made safe. The time to act is now.
As an example, the whole of world trade has changed beyond recognition in the last five years. It is now a seething mass of supply chains covering almost every product and a whole range of countries, usually with computers—and computers containing Chinese parts, at that. That requires a completely different approach to bilateral trade control than anything we have had before.
On energy links, people talk about independent energy in this country. Frankly, that makes absolutely no sense when you look at the technology of energy. All the major sources, both traditional, fossil fuel and new and renewable ones, are heavily dependent on international networks of enormous complexity. Even on our nuclear side—where I think we all, or most people, favour development—people think that if we can build enough large nuclear power stations, we will be all right. That is complete nonsense. It only requires one difficulty in a Korean nuclear power station, or in any part of any system, for the entire world network to be badly affected. If we are talking about electricity and trying to move towards an all-electric economy, we know that we depend on endless interconnectors, linkages and supplies that come only from being heavily dependent on elaborate networks to which we must contribute rather than dance around and try to avoid.
Defence and security are intensely linked, as never before. We say that we must spend more on defence, and of course we must, but what is this defence? Does it really exist? Are we in fact more vulnerable than ever, with strategic threats from hypersonic missiles? Someone pointed out the other day that the V2 came at the end of the Second World War. It was wildly inaccurate, but no one had any conceivable means of stopping it. We were completely defenceless against it. The only defence in the end was for the allied troops to overrun the launching stations and the factories where slave labour was manufacturing these things. That was the only solution. We have not really solved the international missile situation now. We are, in fact, still defenceless.
On the climate, we can do our bit, but CO2 does not obey national frontiers and borders, nor do its effects. This is an area where we obviously have to work entirely new systems and make them operative internationally. Otherwise, we will merely see the continuation of the rise in emissions, which is happening just as fast as it ever was despite all our efforts.
Then there are all the areas that the noble Baroness quite rightly mentioned, as well as inflation, pensions and pandemics. All these are globalised issues. My conclusion is, for the moment, quite simple: we need new, strong, multilateral institutions, which we do not have. In 1945, our brilliant people in America, Britain and other countries came together and created an entirely new international order with strong institutions. Today, that does not exist. I listen in vain to hear that real efforts are being put into restoring the respect and trust that these institutions must have—the UN, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, formerly GATT, the International Maritime Organization and courts of justice. The whole rule of law is being internationally flouted. If I have one wish, it is to hear that new energies are going into that area to provide a shell for what we have to do ourselves as a law-abiding country. A shell is essential because otherwise, without that shell, we shall have the same fate as a snail who proceeds without one. We all know what that is: they get gobbled up.
Before we legislate, we should ask not only whether a risk is sufficiently real and significant to justify intervention—of course, this week’s OpenAI breakout cyber attack makes that question a live one—but whether the proposed intervention will strengthen competition or simply reinforce existing market power. The answer to concentration is competition. The open-weight foundation models are the greatest enabler of competition that AI has yet produced. They fundamentally change the economics of innovation by lowering the cost of deployment and entry—I refer noble Lords to an article in the Washington Post this week by Bill Gurley. These open models allow many more companies, including British start-ups, to build world-class AI applications without first having to spend billions training frontier models. Recent developments have demonstrated that this is no longer theoretical. The emergence of highly capable, low-cost open- foundation models, including from China, shows that cutting-edge AI is no longer confined to a handful of closed proprietary systems. We should welcome that, not because we wish to depend on China—we obviously do not—but because competition is the surest antidote to concentration of power.
Britain does not need to own a frontier model to achieve AI sovereignty. We need the freedom to choose between competing models, the ability to build on them and the capability to deploy them securely, on our terms, into our economy and public services. As I and many other noble Lords have argued before, Britain’s challenge has never been inventing technology; it has been scaling technology companies. Open-foundation models give more British firms the opportunity to compete, grow and retain strategic capability here, as in not bought or moved elsewhere. That is why competition policy matters and why, only where relevant and necessary, the CMA must use its powers in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to ensure that AI markets remain open, competitive and capable of supporting new entrants.
Competition must of course go hand in hand with protection for creators, and the arrival of open foundation models makes getting copyright right more, not less, important. Creators should have the technological means to know when their work is being accessed, to decide whether and at what terms it may be used for AI training, and to receive fair compensation when it is. Measures such as the Private Member’s Bill that my right honourable friend Damian Hinds is introducing in another place about online software access and transparency point towards the kind of targeted transparency that can help achieve those objectives.
The UK has an opportunity to take a distinctive path, embracing open foundation models, protecting intellectual property, using our competition powers robustly and creating the best environment for AI companies to start, scale and compete. If sovereignty is our objective, competition, not concentration, must be our strategy, and competition in AI will depend on whether we embrace the technology that enables it, which will be open-weight foundation models.
I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said: yesterday, we heard about another example of AI moving rapidly from a contained tool to an agentic system that can actively operate across networks without any human intervention. The true threat to our national sovereignty is from the weaponisation of rogue, cross-border AI. Future frontier models will have the capability to bypass localised testing sandboxes, dynamically rewriting their own code to evade containment protocols. Once free, these models can act as borderless, self-replicating digital entities, infiltrating critical national infrastructure, military networks and private cloud storage across the globe. Just imagine if they were subverted by an adversarial foreign nation or cyber-criminal syndicate. These autonomous agents could execute co-ordinated, low-observable attacks on our financial systems and power grids without leaving a traditional digital footprint.
One of my hobby horses when we are talking about AI is how predatory bots are aggressively scraping valuable copyright content from UK website owners without their consent, starving our homegrown creative industries, a major contributor to our economy. True digital sovereignty requires us to protect our creators from intellectual property theft, to break up market monopolies and to build predictive and hardened defences.
I have a couple of questions for my noble friend the Minister. When will the Government issue a refreshed strategic steer to the CMA to reaffirm its independence and inject urgency into its enforcement, ensuring that it acts at a pace that matches the speed at which the AI stack is being monopolised? Secondly, will the Government explicitly rule out new copyright exceptions for AI and support legislative efforts to give UK content creators the legal certainty and transparency they need to block predatory scraping bots?
Let me make five recommendations to the Government. The first is obviously to invest in our infrastructure: to invest in the UK companies that are making the chips, building the data centres and investing in the cloud. I was lucky recently to meet a British company, Fractile, which makes chips. It is a British company, based between Bristol, London and Cambridge, and it has recently raised $200 million, but it plans to stay and grow in Britain. This is exactly the kind of company that we should be supporting. As for not building the stack ourselves, let us look at our competitive advantage, of which Fractile is a good example. It is in a very niche business and has identified a need for a particular chip to support large language models which uses less energy and generates less heat. It is this kind of small infrastructure play that can reap huge dividends for the UK AI economy and is exactly what we should be looking at. We should be looking at grid connections and at building British data centres.
I also echo the earlier comment about creating a national data sovereignty platform. It is absolutely right that one of our unique advantages in this space is the access we have to the data of British citizens, which should be handled carefully but which gives us an enormous advantage, particularly in areas such as the NHS.
The third way forward is to invest as much as possible. I am delighted that the Government have set up sovereign AI—it is only £500 million, but that is still a significant sum; it is less than the €5 billion that the EU has set aside, but we are just a small island—and the fund that has been set aside for AI hardware. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that that £500 million will be fully allocated to sovereign AI and clear up some of the confusion. Her colleague said yesterday that it was moving to DBIST, but I am now told that it is moving to the Cabinet Office. Some clarity on that would be useful.
I referred earlier to my work with Digital Futures. Skills are hugely important in this area. I gather that there are predicted to be around 900,000 vacancies in the tech economy in the next few years and there was a drop in engineering apprentices of some 42% over the last few years. A focus on building the skill economy that we so vitally need to support these industries is important.
Finally, my killer point is that the best way forward would be to abolish the government department that is laser-focused on science, innovation and technology, and to scatter its constituent parts across three different departments and No. 10. That would be a masterstroke, and would allow our civil servants to spend six months trying to sort out where on earth they are meant to be going, rather than implementing policy and delivering. The Minister will not be surprised that I have descended into my default state of facetiousness. The abolition of DSIT is a huge error, considering the urgency this agenda requires and that it has taken three years to get this department up and running and to find its feet. It was a beacon of excellence in Whitehall; many people in the tech economy are sad to see its demise.
Digital sovereignty is particularly important here because the digital realm has taken so much control over our lives, our data, our infrastructure and the very actions of our Government. Meanwhile, many of us are left behind. This is the reality; we are told how great these systems are, but tell that to someone trying to get a system to recognise that this is a photo of them and that it should therefore give them a card—yes, I am reflecting on a recent personal experience.
I will make two key points about who we have handed control to and the nature of that. For the first, I draw on the work of a Danish academic, Ali Rıza Taşkale, who has looked at the Silicon Valley tech bros—the owners of the handful of companies we are talking about that have such a place in the British state—and sees in them an attachment to a philosophy of reactionary futurism, or
“the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects”.
They explicitly set out that they want to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past—19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets and a rejection of democratic government, but armed with all the technology of the 21st century. This is a handful of men—they are all men—who have control over much of the operation of the British state and British society.
In many areas of the country now, as I canvass for the Green Party, I see Ring doorbell after Ring doorbell. Behind that door, I speak to NHS patients who are acutely aware that Palantir, which they know is a concern, very likely has control over their data and private details. We also see stacks of Amazon packaging waste—often beside, not inside, the bins because they will not fit in them.
To put this in the international context, these are individuals who operate in close, often obsequious, contact with the American regime. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, spoke about the “activist White House”. I want to put this in the context of a piece published in the Guardian yesterday by Robert B Shpiner about three speeches given in one day. The Secretary of State said that the counterterrorism architecture should be directed against left-wing political activists—peaceful people. He said that, if they claim that their human rights are being denied, anyone who believes them must be on their side. The White House deputy chief of staff spoke about “left-wing political terrorism”, suggested that you could tell who these people were by what they looked like, and said that any appeal to human rights must “fall on deaf ears”. Then, the American President called the American election system indefensible, claiming that a foreign power had control over it through digital means.
Let us think about the situation that we are in. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that we cannot have autarchy in a digital world. But we must decide who we are lined up with and partnered with. Crucially, to come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, we must have the power to change our mind, to move and to not get locked in.
If I step back a little and look at the wider context of why we are having this debate on policy for the digital and technological world, one of the things we should be mindful of is that while a small number of countries are in a mass race to be the most powerful, a large part of the planet remains in the slow lane. I call it colonisation because I could not think of another word for it, but I want us to look at history and what happens when power falls into the hands of the few. The majority’s ability to challenge that without the tools, knowledge or platform to voice their concerns suddenly becomes a difficult issue for me as a public servant in your Lordships’ House.
When I was listening to the opening remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I was trying to think of where I can navigate some of my fears about what is unfolding rapidly in front of us. While this technology fast lane has been going for some time, our resilience to stop and challenge it has developed very slowly. As I said up front, I have no problem with utilising technology, but I do not want technology to utilise me, and I have feeling that that is the path we are going down. It is frightening, because I work with communities that are so behind the curve on access to even the basics. Can the Minister say how we will secure our sovereignty when our duty is not only to the more than 60 million people in this country but to our place on the global platform? I do not think we have been vocal enough about making sure that, when we disagree with some of the actions taken on our behalf and of the many billions on the planet, we do not remove ourselves from the position of power we have always held, which is the convening power of being a voice for the majority.