Question to the Scotland Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, whether his Department permits (a) Ministers, (b) special advisers and (c) officials to use (i) Chat GPT, (ii) Google Gemini, (iii) Claude, (iv) Deepseek and (v) 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.

Departments provide 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 may only use generative AI tools that their department has approved for official use. The use of publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools, including those named in the Question, for official business is not permitted unless a department has specifically assured and approved that tool.

The Scotland Office uses an approved version of Google Gemini which is 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 AI Playbook for the UK Government, which set out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.