King’s Speech

Baroness Shields Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shields (Con)]

My Lords, His Majesty’s gracious Speech addressed Britain’s security, prosperity and position within an increasingly fractured international order. Yet it made no mention of artificial intelligence, the technological force now profoundly reshaping it.

AI is not just a sectoral or domestic policy issue. It has become foundational to how nations project power, defend their citizens, secure critical infrastructure and maintain sovereignty. AI is not arriving in a stable world. A decade of algorithmic conditioning on social media has already separated people into parallel realities, eroding the shared reference points of international order and co-operation. Today, AI systems capable of matching human cognition are beginning to participate directly in human judgment itself.

The frontier AI systems on which much of the world will depend are being shaped by an extraordinarily narrow concentration of people, power and data. Most nations are not participating meaningfully in this process. They are inheriting it. I believe AI has the potential to usher in the greatest civilisational uplift in human history, but that outcome is not guaranteed. It depends on whether international communities can establish credible frameworks for stewardship before competitive pressures harden into permanent norms.

At present, the opposite is happening. Across the world, the centre of gravity has shifted away from shared safety frameworks towards acceleration, sectoral advantage and national competition. While principles have been written and summits convened, the trajectory of artificial intelligence is increasingly being decided by a handful of individuals—unelected, unaccountable and operating at a scale that democratic institutions were never designed to oversee.

I know from personal experience that many of those building AI systems care deeply about their responsibilities. But private capability, however well intentioned, is not the same as democratic legitimacy. The majority of the world’s nations, representing the majority of the world’s people, are not part of the equation. In the absence of governance, restraint becomes a competitive disadvantage. This is no longer a theoretical question of future risk. It is a present contest over power, incentives and control. A few weeks ago, one major frontier AI company refused to allow its systems to be used in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of citizens. Its competitors agreed to the conditions of unrestricted use and secured the contract.

We are facing a new magnitude of technological power, and the window to shape what comes next is rapidly closing. Sir Demis Hassabis, Nobel laureate and founder of DeepMind, has described this moment as 10 times the Industrial Revolution at 10 times the speed. Other institutions are recognising the scale of this moment. On 25 May, the Holy See will publish Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical on artificial intelligence. It was signed on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Church’s landmark response to the human and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The Holy See recognises that this technological transition will profoundly shape the moral conditions of human society—and that the time to act is now.

The United Kingdom has historically been the country that convened coalitions capable of shaping international order at moments of profound transition. This is such a moment. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will shape the future international order—it already is. The question is whether democratic nations will help shape that order together or whether they will gradually surrender agency to systems, norms and concentrations of power designed elsewhere. Britain has the credibility and alliances to convene that coalition. I urge His Majesty’s Government to place this transformation at the top of the agenda for the United Kingdom’s G20 presidency in 2027.