Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department permits (1) Ministers, (2) Special advisers and (3) officials to use (a) Chat GPT, (b) Google Gemini, (c) Claude, (d) Deepseek and (e) Grok as part of their official duties.

The Government is committed to harnessing the benefits of artificial intelligence to improve the productivity of the Civil Service and the quality of public services.

The Department provides officials, Ministers and special advisers with access to secure, enterprise-grade generative AI tools that have been assured to the appropriate security standards and approved for official use. Ministers, special advisers and officials are directed to use these tools for official duties.

Approved enterprise tools are configured so that departmental data is held securely and is not used to train publicly available AI models. The use of generative AI across government is governed by the cross-government Generative AI Framework for HMG and the AI Playbook for the UK Government, which set out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.

Defra officials are currently permitted to access Microsoft Chat and Copilot through the Departments Enterprise agreement. Microsoft CoPilot enables controlled access to Chat GPT. Access to DeepSeek is explicitly prohibited and prevented by network rules. Google Gemini, Claude and Grok are accessible for the purposes of exploration or experimentation. Access has been provisioned under the strictest of guidance to caution against entering any personal, sensitive or restricted data. In all cases, the use of publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools, including those named in the Question, is not permitted for official business.