Baroness Kidron (CB)

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax, on raising what is rightly a fundamental question of our time: the risk of AI systems becoming more powerful than their human creators. Advanced AI does not become unsafe in a vacuum; it becomes unsafe by design when it is developed without accountability, driven by profit incentives of private actors and embedded in infrastructure that the state can neither inspect nor exit. Alongside concerns of runaway capability is the risk of dependency. Long before any dramatic accident or attack, we risk a growing reliance on a narrow set of foreign-owned technologies, leaving the UK unable to act as a sovereign state with values, choices and technologies of its own. Just this week, the Ministry of Defence awarded a £240 million contract for “critical operational decision-making support” to Palantir. The issue here is not one company but a pattern of outsourcing our national infrastructure to American firms, backed by a US Administration whose national security strategy states plainly: “In everything we do, we are putting America first”. Across the economy, we have normalised deep vendor lock-in to US companies to the point where security, critical industries and sensitive government departments cannot credibly switch suppliers, even as the risks or the terms of engagement shift. One security expert recently described it to me as economic warfare, where they create strategic advantage by advancing their domestic industry and technology while simultaneously degrading the same capacity in adversaries and allies alike. Where the state cannot inspect, audit or exit the systems that shape its decisions or handle sensitive data, it has no sovereignty. The US and China are determinedly ahead, but many AI experts believe that the next phase of AI will favour systems that are reliable, auditable and governed by understood rules. That is where the United Kingdom has an opportunity. There is not time today to set out a sovereign strategy for AI. But in systems that shape our defence, policing, health service and democratic decision-making, sovereignty must be the default, with onshore audit and assurance, procurement that builds domestic capability, control over strategic pinch-points and the ultimate power to say no. I join the noble Lord in asking for greater autonomy and power for the AI Security Institute. AI will not evade human control because it suddenly becomes clever; it will evade control because we have designed systems in which no one is responsible, no one can see clearly and no one can intervene in time.