Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, 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.

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 AI Playbook for the UK Government, which sets out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.

In DESNZ, Microsoft 365 Copilot is available to officials within the secure Microsoft 365 environment. Copilot integrates with departmental data under existing access controls, and includes Claude models in some Copilot experiences and agents.

Ministers and Special Advisers are granted access to M365 Copilot for departmental duties when using a DESNZ account and a DESNZ device.