Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty

Baroness Gill Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

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.

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?