AI Regulation Bill

Lord Markham Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Holmes for bringing this debate forward today. It is a complex area, and we would all agree that it is difficult to do it justice with such limited time. I think we also all agree that there are some areas where we definitely need controls on AI: safeguarding against suicidal ideation, imparting dangerous knowledge on biological and other weaponry, and nudification of people, to name just a few areas.

However, we also see that there are dangers to overregulation and tying our hands behind our back. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, AI is a winner-takes-all world. In the area of defence, as the noble Baroness, Lady Antrobus, mentioned, we need only to see a small technologically advanced Spanish army defeating a much larger Aztec army to learn some of the lessons—we do not want to be in that position as we go forward. Unless we can get every country in the world—and every terrorist group—to sign up to the same set of regulatory rules, we are danger of being on the wrong side of history. I would much rather make sure that we are at the forefront of AI development, rather than at the mercy of others, by tying our hands behind our back with regulatory restrictions.

It is with this knowledge that the Conservative Government took the approach they did, setting up the AI Security Institute to try to safeguard and test models for the reputable producers of AI, so we can make sure they are working in the way we want them to. In combining that with an agile regulatory framework, as my noble friend Lord Camrose previously noted, the priority was to ensure coherence across existing regulations while having a period of non-statutory implementation. AI will touch every aspect of our lives: business, social, health, education, defence and media. I believe it is impossible for one AI regulator to act across all those fields, but much more manageable to make every regulator responsible for their part of AI in that area.

I am afraid, however, that I do not know what this Government’s approach is. Do they intend to continue with the current framework or a more cross-sectoral model? It is vital to get this right to ensure that the UK is at the forefront of AI, so I look forward to hearing from the Minister the Government’s approach.