Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit

Greg Clark Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee.

[Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)]

May I congratulate the Government on convening the summit and on its success? It is, as the Secretary of State said, a considerable achievement to get the US, the EU and China to agree a communiqué. It was good to have access to the frontier models that the summit agreed. Having future summits, in six months’ time, is also an important step forward.

As the Secretary of State said, the summit focused principally on frontier AI, but it is vital that we can deal with the here-and-now risks of the AI being deployed already. In the White Paper that they published in March, the Government said that they expected to legislate to have regulators pay

“due regard to the principles”

of that White Paper, but such a Bill was missing from the King’s Speech. Meanwhile, in the US, a very extensive executive order has been issued, and the EU is finalising its Artificial Intelligence Act.

Will the Secretary of State think again, in publishing the response to the White Paper, about taking this final opportunity before a general election to ensure that the good intentions and practice of the Government are not inadvertently left behind, with other jurisdictions’ legislation preceding our own and other people setting the rules rather than the United Kingdom setting a framework for the world?

[Michelle Donelan]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his important question. I think it is right that we do not rush to legislate, because we need to understand properly the risks that we are facing. That is why we have been investing in bringing on board the correct experts, both into Government and into the taskforce that will now morph into the institute. It is why we have also committed not just ourselves but our international partners to producing the “state of the science” reports, so that we can stay up to date with those risks.

Absolutely, we will eventually have to legislate, but as we said in the White Paper that we published earlier this year, we do not need to rush to do that; we need to get the timing right to ensure that we have the right solutions to match those problems. There is a lot that we can do without legislation. We demonstrated that last week by convening the world for collective action to secure pre-model deployment testing, to ensure that we work together to get a better handle on the risks, and to encourage partners such as America to go further, on which we have seen us and them acting in lockstep.