UK’s tech minister warns AI companies: Ensure safety or face ‘assertive’ regulation

Peter Kyle, who was appointed as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology by incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has promised that the new Labour government will prioritise AI safety.

In an interview with Sky News, Kyle said that the government will have “very high expectations” of tech companies developing artificial intelligence. For those companies that don’t ensure their products are safe, he warned that they’ll come up against a “very assertive government”.

Kyle is taking over the cabinet role from former Conservative MP Michelle Donelan, who lost her seat to the Liberal Democrats in the recent election. Donelan’s stint saw the breakneck speed of AI capabilities advancements in 2023, which prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to hold the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, and to form the world’s first AI Safety Institute – inspiring an international network of similar institutes in the US, Japan and more.

PauseAI protesters at the 2023 AI Safety Summit

At the follow-up Seoul AI Summit in May 2024 (which saw “safety” dropped from its name), Donelan was firm in her call for the world’s government to not “rest on [their] laurels”, and to keep their regulatory efforts up with the accelerating pace of AI progress.

Kyle, who served as the shadow secretary to Donelan from September 2023, wants to improve on the work of the previous government:

“I want to reassure people that the AI Safety Institute, we will keep and we will invest in, and we will make sure that actually it’s put to greater use, I believe, going forward than it is even now”

Whilst Labour were in opposition, Kyle announced their plans to force AI companies to share their testing data with the government, replacing Sunak’s existing voluntary agreement. He argued this would allow regulators to better understand “where this technology is taking us”.

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