Open Artificial Intelligence Service

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

The sovereign AI unit is already publishing what it does on its website and consulting very broadly. As the noble Lord knows, there is a consultation on the AI Bill. I can confirm that it will not be September, but I cannot confirm beyond that.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this kind of citizen ownership clearly has attractions in terms of developing public trust, developing AI for public benefit, and being an antidote to big-tech concentration. But does not open-source AI represent a more straightforward path to AI sovereignty? This avoids the need for massive capital investment in model training and enables new models to be created using UK expertise. Will the Government, through the sovereign AI unit, incentivise and support this approach, perhaps in tandem with the concept of citizen ownership?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

As the noble Lord rightly says, the open AI approach—I mean the general approach to openness, not the company—has been an important part of how this has progressed so rapidly and will be an important part of what we do going forward. We need partnerships where necessary in order to access existing models, but we also need to develop our accompanying hardware, data and skills domestic infrastructure. We will continue to view openness as an important part of how we do that.