Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department is taking steps to help prevent intellectual property (a) theft and (b) infringement by (i) artificial intelligence and (ii) other products and software with machine learning capabilities.

The Government takes the infringement of intellectual property rights seriously, and as the lead agency the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) recognises the importance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning both for their potential infringing uses, as well as the tools they may provide to assist in the enforcement of IP rights.

To better understand this emerging area of technology, the IPO has commissioned and will shortly publish a report examining whether and how AI can be used to track and trace Intellectual Property infringing goods, as well as assessing the resulting money flows and the potential use of AI by those infringing IPR.