Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what alternative suppliers they considered for the GOV.UK chat service before selecting Anthropic's Claude model; and what assessment they have made of contracting United Kingdom based AI developers for this project.

The Government Digital Service has considered a range of large language models from multiple suppliers in developing GOV.UK Chat. Earlier iterations tested OpenAI’s ChatGPT models, while the current phase is evaluating Anthropic’s Claude models. Model selection decisions are based on performance, security, data protection, cost, and alignment with government standards. GOV.UK Chat is being developed entirely within the Government Digital Service by a multidisciplinary team of civil servants. The Government continues to engage with UK-based AI developers and remains open to collaboration where this supports innovation and the delivery of public services.