Lord Young of Acton (Con)

My thanks go to my noble friend Lord Holmes for securing this debate. The last thing that one of the few sectors in the British economy that is growing needs is more regulation. The example of Anthropic referring Mythos to the AI Security Institute in order to do a safety evaluation shows that AI companies have a commercial incentive to prioritise safety. That is not an argument for a cross-sector regulator. I am concerned that more red tape will favour well-resourced incumbents who can afford compliance departments and penalise scrappy upstarts. The UK is currently third in the world in the AI arms race. How long will it retain that position if we introduce heavy-handed regulation to the UK, which would put us at a competitive disadvantage? I urge the Government not to think about creating a cross-sector AI regulator but, instead, to think about the transnational regulation of AI and to engage with some of our trading partners on developing a transnational regulatory framework that could be built into trade agreements. The natural trading partner to begin that conversation with, if you are not having it already, is the United States, which is the leading developer of AI in the world. I would prefer a transnational regulatory system for AI to be based on the principles of the first amendment and developed in partnership with the United States—perhaps with Switzerland, too, as another non-EU European country—rather than favouring the model in the EU’s AI safety Act, which, like the EU’s Digital Services Act, prioritises safety over liberty and innovation to far too great an extent.