Artificial Intelligence: UK Preparedness

Earl Russell Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

The Government are adopting a proportionate, context-based approach to regulation. By empowering existing regulators to apply cross-cutting principles such as safety, fairness and transparency, we ensure that oversight is tailored to specific sectoral risks rather than a one-size-fits-all model. This framework improves innovation while maintaining credible and forcible safeguards. We remain in constant dialogue with industry and civil society to ensure a regulatory regime evolves in lockstep with technological advancement.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, the director-general of MI5 recently publicly warned that it would be reckless to ignore AI’s ability to implement harm, particularly from autonomous systems that are free of human oversight. Anthropic recently detected the first documented large-scale cyber espionage campaign using agentic AI. Given that we are entering an era when AI systems change tasks together and make decisions with minimal human input, what specific mechanisms are the Government establishing to maintain meaningful human control over increasingly autonomous AI systems, before we effectively lose the ability to do so?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

The noble Earl makes an interesting point. Progress has never been risk-free. Every major leap forward has come with doubts, critics and problems to solve. If it had not, we would never have heard,

“one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”,

and Henry Ford would not have been making cars. With that same spirit, we are investing £500 million in our sovereign AI capabilities. It is why we are creating AI growth labs and growth zones. These are places where the private sector can invest, experiment, scale and turn ideas into real products. The facts are on our side. We are the third-largest destination for AI investment in the world, behind the US and China. We have world-class talent, ambitious companies and a drive to lead.