Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, has done us all a favour by facilitating this discourse, but it should not be necessary. In the 2024 King’s Speech, the Government committed to placing binding regulations on the developers of the most powerful AI models. Almost two years later, we still await legislation to fulfil this commitment. I therefore hope that my noble friend will be able to explain why that important policy has been dropped in favour of a weaker approach through targeted regulation at the point of use. This ignores the warnings by experts developing superintelligent AI and leaves a major regulatory gap because recent models, such as Claude Mythos, have exposed the serious risks that originate at the point of development. On this occasion, the developers decided not to release the model to the public owing to its dangerous capabilities, but a more blindly profit-driven company or hostile actor in the future may not, and we cannot afford to rely on private companies doing the right thing to avoid national and global security threats. It has been said that the pace of technological change is greater today than it has ever been, but never again will it be as slow as it is today. Companies are investing in what is known as recursive self-improvement, which means AIs autonomously developing more AIs. That would be the point at which we as humans lose control—a truly frightening prospect. MI5 director-general Ken McCallum recently commented that “Artificial intelligence may never ‘mean’ us harm. But it would be reckless to ignore the potential for it to cause harm”. I declare an interest of sorts, because I am one of more than 100 parliamentarians in both Houses who have joined ControlAI’s campaign on raising awareness of superintelligence and calling for binding regulation on the most powerful models. British mathematicians and scientists have done much to advance Al technology and the leading ones—the Nobel laureates and “godfathers of AI”—are loudest in their calls for proper regulation. It is past time that the Government took note and acted decisively.