Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, for initiating this important and timely debate. As a signatory to the AI Red Lines initiative, I agree very much with his reasons for bringing this debate to the Committee. Sadly, with apologies, there is too little time to properly wind up and acknowledge other contributions in the debate today. In September 2025, Anthropic detected the first documented large-scale cyber espionage campaign using agentic AI. AI is no longer merely generating content; it is autonomously executing code to breach the security of organisations and nations. Leading AI researchers have already warned us of fundamental control challenges. Yoshua Bengio, AI pioneer and Turing Award winner, reports that AI systems and experiments have chosen their own preservation over human safety. Professor Stuart Russell describes the control problem: how to maintain power over entities more powerful than us. Mustafa Suleyman, one of the two founders of DeepMind, has articulated the containment problem: that AI’s inherent tendency towards autonomy makes traditional containment methods insufficient. The Institution of Engineering and Technology reports that six in 10 engineering employers already use AI, yet 46% of senior management do not understand it and 50% of employers expecting AI to be important lack necessary skills. If senior leaders cannot grasp AI fundamentals, they cannot govern it effectively. The Government’s response appears fragmented, not only as regards sovereign AI development. We inexplicably renamed the AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute, muddling two distinct concepts. We lag behind the EU AI Act, South Korea’s AI Basic Act, Singapore’s governance framework and even China’s regulation of public-facing generative AI. Meanwhile, voluntary approaches are failing. Let me press the Government on three crucial issues. First, ahead of AGI or superintelligence, as I frequently argue, we need binding legislation with clear mandates, not advisory powers. ISO standards embodying key principles provide a good basis in terms of risk management, ethical design, testing, training, monitoring and transparency and should be applied where appropriate. We need a broader definition of safety that encompasses financial, societal, reputational and mental health risks, not just physical harm. What is the Government’s plan in this respect? Secondly, we must address the skills crisis. People need confidence in using AI and need more information on how it works. We need more agile training programmes beyond current initiatives and AI literacy and we need to guard against deskilling. Thirdly, we must consider sustainability. AI consumes enormous energy, yet could mitigate 5% to 10% of global greenhouse gases by 2030. What is the Government’s approach on this? As Stuart Russell has noted, when Alan Turing warned in 1951 that machines would take control, our response resembled telling an alien civilisation that we were out of office. The question is whether we will act with the seriousness that this moment demands or allow big tech, largely US-owned, to override the fundamental imperative of maintaining human control over these increasingly powerful systems in its own interests.