Government delays new AI Bill for six months
AI Bill not expected before summer as UK seeks to align with new US administration
The government has delayed until summer publication of its AI Bill, a new law intended to regulate AI, following on from the EU AI Act which came into force last year.
The government had been expected to introduce such a bill shortly after it was elected in July, which would have demanded that companies provide their AI models to the UK’s AI Security Institute for testing. The aim of the bill was to assuage fears that AI could pose a risk to humanity, or be misused by nefarious actors by having new models vetted by the Institute.
However, fears of a backlash by the new American administration have repeatedly delayed the introduction of the bill, which has now been put back to summer at the earliest.
A senior source in the Labour Party told The Guardian that there were still “no hard proposals in terms of what the legislation looks like”, although another source suggested that a bill had been prepared before Christmas, but that ministers were reluctant to introduce it because it could make the UK a less attractive place to research and conduct AI.
Indeed, the UK already has some of the world’s highest power prices, as well as carbon taxes and other levies that together make opening and operating datacentres in the UK more expensive than in the US and many other jurisdictions around the world.
Nevertheless, the government has pushed its support for AI and the datacentre sector particularly hard since it came to power. First, it designated the sector as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) alongside energy and water; second, it has developed a strategy for AI Growth Zones where building and operating a datacentre optimised for AI ought to be quicker and easier.
At the same time, the government is facing opposition to its plans to allow companies involved in AI to use copyrighted materials on which to train their models, with a campaign against it being led by the Daily Mail, as well as the "Make It Fair" campaign backed by the creative industries, including the Creative Rights in AI Coalition and the News Media Association.
They claim that allowing AI models to milk copyrighted works, whether published online or offline, will undermine the publishing industry across the board, enabling US tech giants to make billions at the expense of British publishers and creatives. A consultation on the issue closes today.
The delay to the AI Bill comes after furore over Apples roll back of end-to-end encryption for UK users as a result of government demands.
Apple’s decision stemmed from a government order issued in January under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA). Security officials wanted the ability to retrieve encrypted content uploaded to Apple’s iCloud – something even the company itself cannot do due to the encryption process. Rather than weaken it for everyone in the world, the company has downgraded the security for UK users.