King’s Speech (4th Day)

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, and welcome him to this House, and to congratulate his fellow Ministers on their new appointments to the Government Front Bench. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Petitgas on his absolutely barnstorming maiden speech; he is going to be an excellent addition to our Benches and I am so pleased that I was in the Chamber to hear him

Today, I want to focus on the future—specifically, the role of generative AI in producing economic growth. As other noble Lords have said, the UK is among the world leaders in the development of this technology. Indeed, there has been a recent rush of inward investment. During just one week in May this year, CoreWeave announced $1 billion of investment in data centres; and Wayve, the British autonomous vehicles business, raised over $1 billion in funding. Alongside CoreWeave, other AI businesses such as Scale AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir and Cohere have all chosen the UK to locate their European headquarters. The biggest Silicon Valley venture capital firms have opened offices in London. Alongside the appeal of our homegrown talent and their innovations emerging from incubator universities, these firms are coming here because we have not followed Europe and rushed to regulate AI.

In our report, Large Language Models and Generative AI, earlier this year, the Communications and Digital Select Committee, which I chaired in the last Parliament and hope to start chairing again soon, highlighted the risks of the Government getting the balance between safety and innovation wrong. We were concerned about the serious risk of regulatory capture and of introducing legislation that entrenched the market dominance of big tech. We said that the markets for AI must remain open, and that not creating barriers to entry but supporting innovation should be the Government’s priority when considering any new regulation.

One of my personal fears with this new technology is not some existential risk to the human race; it is repeating the same mistakes which led to a single firm dominating search, no UK-based cloud service and a couple of firms controlling social media. Only on Friday, the worldwide disruption caused by CrowdStrike’s update to Microsoft Windows showed us just how vulnerable we are to concentration in the market. It was therefore music to my ears when Rishi Sunak declared in May that the Government were pro-open source, which is critical if we are to avoid a new oligopoly, and confirmed that they would not be legislating. However, I was dismayed, if not surprised, to read in the Financial Times ahead of the gracious Speech that, by contrast, the Labour Government would introduce new AI regulation. I was then confused to read on the day of the King’s Speech—in the FT again, so it must be true—that following a last-minute tussle between DSIT and No. 10, the Government would not be announcing a Bill but launching a consultation instead.

Today, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, said that the Government would bring forward

“binding regulations on the handful of companies that are developing the most powerful AI models”.

This is precisely what these big tech firms want, because it assumes that the technology is static and no one else can or will enter the market. That is so very wrong and risks closing the door on more innovation and growth. Will the Minister who is winding up the debate please clarify the Government’s position on regulating this important new technology? Are the Government pro-open markets? Are they pro-open source? What is their position on copyright in the context of AI? Copyright is the most significant issue of contention, where clarity is needed urgently so that our news and creative industries are properly recognised for their vital contribution to this technology’s development.

In short, can the noble Lord confirm that his Government will not adopt a similar approach to that of the EU, or seek regulatory alignment with the EU, when it comes to regulating AI? I worry that when it comes to generating economic growth, this Government’s vision of the future will soon look uncannily like the past. While some Members of this House would be rather pleased if it did, when it comes to maintaining our position in the world in developing and deploying AI, and the potential of what some now refer to as little tech, believe me, a new version of “Back to the Future” would not be good for UK economic growth.