LONDON — London and Washington are to announce a “close collaboration” on AI safety as early as Wednesday, a U.K and U.S. official confirmed to POLITICO.
The collaboration is expected to marry new guardrails the White House placed on artificial intelligence development in this week’s executive order (EO) with existing work by the United Kingdom’s “Frontier AI Taskforce.”
“We plan to announce close bilateral collaboration with the U.S. safety institute this week,” a U.K. official close to the planning of Britain’s AI safety summit told POLITICO. The person was granted anonymity to talk about the summit, which will take place at Bletchley Park on Nov. 1 and 2.
Both countries will be announcing their own version of the institutes as the summit kicks off. In a speech Wednesday in London, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is representing the Biden administration at the summit, will announce the United States AI Safety Institute, which will be housed at the Department of Commerce, according to a U.S. official granted anonymity to discuss internal plans.
“It will work to create guidelines, standards and best practices for evaluating and mitigating the full spectrum of risks,” the U.S. official added. “We must address the full spectrum of risk, from potentially catastrophic risks to societal harms that are already happening such [as] bias, discrimination and the proliferation of misinformation.”
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he will set up an “AI Safety Institute” that will examine, evaluate and test new types of the emerging technology. Sunak said the new institute will build on the work of Britain’s existing Frontier AI Taskforce, which he said has already been granted “privileged access” to the technology models of leading AI companies like Google DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI.
The countries will “also participate in information sharing and research collaboration,” said the U.S. official, and will be making their own separate announcements. The U.S. will also share information with other similar safety institutes in other countries.
The White House executive order signed Monday will require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government. It is designed to ensure AI systems are safe before companies make them public. Under the EO, Washington will set up an “AI Safety and Security Board.”
The U.K.’s Tech Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO that it was easier for the U.S. to lead the industry to be more transparent because it is dominated by American firms | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“We’re trying to lead with substance here and we’re trying to engage with other countries with substance and this is a vision, and the Vice President will lay it out in her speech, […] for how the United States is seeing AI policy and AI governance,” said the White House special adviser on AI, Ben Buchanan, on the forthcoming episode of the POLITICO Tech podcast on the timing of the EO coming in the same week as the U.K. AI summit. Harris is giving a speech in London on the administration’s AI initiatives, including the EO on Wednesday afternoon.
The U.K.’s Tech Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO on Tuesday that it was easier for the U.S. to lead the industry to be more transparent because it is dominated by American firms, but there are aspects of the work that the U.K. can move faster on.
“I know America and other countries will have plans for institutes too, but we can do it a lot quicker, because we already have that initial organization in the [Frontier AI Taskforce],” she said. “We’ve already got that expertise setup, funding in there, and our processes allow us to do that at a quicker speed.”
“The future vision is to secure the safety of models before they are released,” Sunak said Thursday. Britain is expected to publish some information publicly, but will reserve more sensitive national security intel to a smaller group of like-minded governments.
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Vincent Manancourt, Eugene Daniels and Annabelle Dickson
LONDON — Britain’s tech chief is no stranger to dealing with big egos. She used to promote superstar wrestlers.
U.K. Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan’s past career as a marketeer for WWE wrestling may stand her in good stead at Bletchley Park on Wednesday, as she hosts representatives from more than 100 tech companies, countries and academic institutions on the first day of a U.K.-hosted summit which aims to grapple with one of the biggest challenges of our time — the rise of artificial intelligence.
Working at the fast-paced WWE was “very much like” being at her busy Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Donelan tells POLITICO — somewhat improbably — in an eve-of-summit interview at her sparsely-decorated office on Whitehall.
The oddball world of commercial wrestling was also good training for politics.
“It was an eye-opener to different personalities, and how to deal with those different personalities,” she says — ideal for “dealing with big egos, in terms of British politics.”
A low-profile Tory MP who only bagged her first junior ministerial job in 2019, Donelan makes for a surprising compère for the first day of Rishi Sunak’s much-hyped AI summit.
Unlike Sunak, the 39-year-old was no self-professed tech geek when she was entrusted with setting up his new science and technology department in February 2023. By her own admission she doesn’t regularly use generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
But Donelan, who was pregnant with her first child when she was handed the science and tech brief, has been wading through piles of binders detailing technical information as she tries to get to grips with the subject. Colleagues note admiringly (and sometimes despairingly) how she operates on just a few hours sleep.
“I think my journey on this has been a deeper understanding of … just how vital it is that we do lead in this, that we aren’t passive, that we don’t wait for others,” she says.
Summit going on
Since February, Donelan has been laying the groundwork for a summit Sunak hopes will be one of the defining moments of his premiership, with the objective of convincing world leaders to agree on the risks posed by AI.
She, like the PM, is concerned about the potential disruption artificial intelligence could pose. “The risks are very daunting, there’s no denying that,” she says, while acknowledging “there is a debate about whether they will materialize or not.”
Her critics say the summit is wrongly focused on long-term risk, however, and argue not enough is being done to tackle AI’s more immediate threats.
The U.K. is “way behind” in terms of bringing forward actual legislation, said Peter Kyle, Donelan’s opposite number in the Labour Party, who has not been invited to this week’s summit. Donelan’s department has not yet even published a response to its own consultation on an artificial intelligence white paper published way back in March, he pointed out.
Donelan insists the summit is “only part” of the U.K.’s work on artificial intelligence, however and that it plans to say more about the white paper — a first step toward legislation — “by the end of the year.”
“We’re not afraid to legislate. There will have to be legislation in this space eventually,” she says.
But specifics are thin on the ground. She refuses to be drawn on “arbitrary timelines.”
Surviving the hospital pass
It was Donelan’s embrace of the government’s controversial Online Safety Bill, which she inherited in her previous ministerial role during the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, which attracted the attention of Sunak.
In the hard-fought Tory leadership campaign of July and August 2022, Truss and Sunak both promised to scrap parts of the bill focused on policing “legal but harmful” online content. It was Donelan, appointed as culture secretary by Truss, who was left to unravel those pledges.
Her “no-nonsense” and “methodical” approach to the bill, and her willingness to take the views of her MP colleagues seriously, impressed Sunak when he arrived in No. 10 following Truss’ self-destruction.
For that reason he kept her in post — and then chose her to set up the new department for science and technology earlier this year, according to a No. 10 official closely involved with that decision, granted anonymity to discuss internal government business.
“I think Rishi, like me, can see that she is one of those effective secretaries of state that will deliver outcomes,” said former Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, whom Donelan worked alongside prior to her promotion to Cabinet.
Finally getting the Online Safety Bill into law was a notable achievement. Donelan’s previous claim to fame had been her unwanted record of being the shortest-serving Cabinet minister in British history. She took the job of education secretary, and then resigned 35 hours later, in the chaotic final days of the Boris Johnson administration.
Child protection
Donelan’s resolve to get the bill through parliament had been hardened by a one-to-one meeting with campaigner Ian Russell last November. His daughter Molly took her own life after viewing suicide content online.
Donelan has kept the dossier of Molly’s posts handed to her by Russell at that private meeting, according to one U.K. government official. “From that [meeting] she was more determined to do something on child protection,” they said.
“It was heart-wrenching to hear his story, and those of other bereaved parents and I felt very passionately that we had an opportunity to really make a difference on this and to and to change the nature in which we regulate the online world,” Donelan says.
Her approach was strikingly different to the long line of Tory ministers who preceded her. Her willingness to simply pick up the phone to relevant business leaders — often bypassing official government channels — has won her admirers in the exasperated U.K. tech industry, which has endured a succession of different ministers overseeing a bill plagued by uncertainty.
“It was a complete breath of fresh air when she came in,” said Dom Hallas, executive director of tech lobbying outfit the Startup Coalition. “At industry roundtables she is to the point and well-briefed, but she is also frank when something is not going to happen.”
“She actually gets things done, which I would contrast with the previous [Boris Johnson-led] regime. She does listen and seems interested in trying to find out what various stakeholders think about things,” Julian David, chief executive of industry body TechUK, added.
Donelan feels she has skin in the game. Her son was born in the spring, and the tech secretary says the new online laws make her “a lot more confident in his use of social media, when he’s old enough.”
Donelan confirms, however, that being handed a new government department, while heavily pregnant, and about to take maternity leave, was no small challenge.
“I’m not going to lie. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Before you have a child you don’t appreciate you are going to have things like ‘Mum guilt’,” she says. “It was easier in my head and harder in reality.”
The long game
Donelan’s unshowy style belies a burning ambition, according to multiple MPs and officials who have tracked her career to date.
In 1999, aged just 15, she spoke at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool. She was just 26 when she first stood for election, as a no-hoper in the safe Labour seat of Wentworth and Dearne in 2010.
Three years later she became the Conservative candidate for the Lib Dem held seat of Chippenham — going on to overturn a 2,470 Lib Dem majority in the 2015 general election.
On arriving in parliament, Donelan’s ambition was obvious to colleagues. One recalls her immediately asking for advice on how to climb the career ladder.
Soon after she took her first step up, as a parliamentary private secretary — a lowly unpaid aide to a minister — the Conservative whips’ office created a leaderboard tallying the workrate of the 40-odd MPs holding similar roles. Donelan led the way, smashing every target by a significant margin, one minister said.
“If she’s given a task she will attack it like nothing else. I’m not so sure about the bigger picture stuff — wider strategizing and setting a direction herself. But give her a direction and she’ll go at it,” the same minister said.
In her private life, Donelan is a committed Christian who shies away from the darker side of politics. She is “extremely respectful of Cabinet colleagues,” another former government official who worked with her said. “She doesn’t seem to be involved in backdoor skulduggery. It is all very earnest, but it is working for her in a way that is quite refreshing.”
Yet she raised eyebrows at the Conservative Party conference in October with a main stage speech clearly designed to please the grassroots and capture a few right-wing headlines. Donelan vowed a crackdown on the “creeping wokeism” she claimed is threatening scientific research — and went viral for all the wrong reasons.
A difficult interview with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire at the same conference also landed her less-than-positive headlines.
For an ambitious minister looking to wrestle her way onto the world stage this week, these are nothing more than hazards of the job.
BLETCHLEY PARK, England — The United States and China joined global leaders to sign a 27-country agreement on the risk of AI that launched a two-day AI Safety Summit.
In a major diplomatic coup for the British hosts, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo took the stage on Wednesday morning alongside Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science, at the summit at Bletchley Park — a former military installation north of London where British engineers used early forms of computers to break German codes during World War II.
The site — symbolic of what London believes is a similar global need to rein in the potential harms of artificial technology — forms the backdrop for efforts by politicians, tech executives and academics to find new ways to police a technology evolving faster than almost all governments can respond to it.
This week alone, the U.S. government and G7 group of leading Western democracies published separate efforts to regulate artificial intelligence in the form of a White House executive order and voluntary code of conduct, respectively. The EU expects to complete its separate Artificial Intelligence Act by early December and the United Nations’ newly-created AI advisory board will provide its own recommendations by the end of 2023.
“We will compete as nationals. But even as we compete vigorously, we must search for global solutions for global problems,” said Raimondo, who is traveling to the United Kingdom alongside U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. “The work, of course, does not begin and end with just the U.S. and the U.K. We want to expand information sharing, research, collaboration, and ultimately policy alignment across the globe.”
In a summit communiqué, published Wednesday, 27 countries and the EU signed the so-called Bletchley Park Declaration on AI. The document focuses solely on so-called “frontier AI,” or the latest version of the technology that has become popular via digital services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The signing countries include both China and the U.S. despite the world’s two largest economies battling over everything from technology to geopolitical power. The voluntary statement commits governments to work together toward trustworthy and responsible AI — catchwords for the safe use of the emerging technology.
“China is willing to engage on AI governance for the promotion of all mankind. That’s our objective,” Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science and technology, told the audience in Bletchley. The official sat on stage next to the U.S.’s Raimondo despite the countries’ ongoing tension.
References to global AI regulation efforts undertaken by international organizations such as the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which were featured in an earlier draft, did not make it to the final communiqué. Questioned about that in a press briefing, U.K. Digital Minister Michelle Donelan said that the summit “complements and doesn’t cut across the existing processes” unfolding at the international level, and that officials from the U.N. and the OECD see the U.K.’s initiative as “as a missing piece of the [AI regulation] puzzle” as it specifically deals with advanced frontier AI.
The British government announced the next AI Safety Summit will be held in South Korea in May, 2024 and a third event is planned for France by the end of next year. The U.K. and the U.S. also announced plans to work together on AI Safety Institutes, which are expected to exchange analyses.
Věra Jourová, the EU’s digital chief, welcomed the renewed efforts to rein in potential risks associated with the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence. The 27-country bloc has been working on its own AI legislation for the last three years. But the Czech politician acknowledged much had changed over that time period when it came to what AI systems could now do.
“We have a common obligation for doing this right,” Jourová told the British audience Wednesday in reference to global efforts to set guardrails for the emerging technology. “The future will ask us if we did the right thing at the right moment.”
LONDON — Britain’s tough new plan to police the internet has left politicians in a stand-off with WhatsApp and other popular encrypted messaging services. Deescalating that row will be easier said than done.
The Online Safety Bill, the United Kingdom’s landmark effort to regulate social media giants, gives regulator Ofcom the power to require tech companies to identify child sex abuse material in private messages.
But the proposals have prompted Will Cathcart, boss of the Meta-owned messaging app, whose encrypted service is widely-used in Westminster’s own corridors of power, to claim it would rather be blocked in the U.K. than compromise on privacy.
“The core of what we do is a private messaging service for billions of people around the world,” Cathcart told POLITICO in March when he jetted in to London to lobby ministers over the upcoming bill. “When the U.K., a liberal democracy, says, ‘Oh, it is okay to scan everyone’s private communication for illegal content,’ that emboldens countries around the world that have very different definitions of illegal content to propose the same thing,” he added.
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages — echoing claims from the tech industry that date back more than a decade that they can’t create backdoors in encrypted digital services, even to protect kids online, because to do so opens the products up to vulnerabilities from bad actors, including foreign governments.
“We can’t just let thousands of pedophiles get away with it. That wouldn’t be responsible or proportionate for a government to do,” Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO in February.
Ministers are keen to lower the temperature. But doing so will prove challenging, two former ministers told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, given the likelihood of pushback from MPs, the complexity of the technology and the emotiveness of the issue.
Easier said than done
Finding a compromise is unlikely to be easy — and the row mirrors similar debates that are underway in the European Union and Australia over just how accountable tech platforms should be for potentially harmful content on encrypted services.
The debate over whether the requirements of the bill can be met while protecting privacy centers around “client-side scanning.”
While leaders at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre and security agency GCHQ said last July they believe such technology can simultaneously protect children and privacy, other experts dispute their findings.
A raft of cryptographers criticized the technique in a report called Bugs in Our Pockets in 2021 prompting tech giant Apple to abandon plans to introduce client-side scanning on its services. In Australia, the country’s eSafety Commissioner recently published a report highlighting how the likes of Microsoft and Apple had few, if any, mechanisms to track child sexual abuse material, including via their encrypted services.
“This is not only companies really taking a blind eye to live crime scenes happening on their platforms, but they’re also failing to properly harden their systems and storage against abuse,” Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told POLITICO. “It’s akin to leaving a home open to an intruder. Once that bad actor is inside the house, good luck getting them out.”
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages | Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images
Hacking risk
Cybersecurity experts agree the U.K. bill’s demands are incompatible with a desire to protect encryption. They claim that privacy is not a fungible issue — services either have it or they don’t. And they warn that politicians should be wary of undermining such protections in ways that would make people’s online experiences potentially open to abuse or hacking.
“In essence, end-to-end encryption involves not having a door, or if you want to use a postal analogy, not having a sorting office for the state to search. Client-side-scanning, despite the claims of its proponents, does seem to involve some kind of level of access, some kind of ability to sort and scan, and therefore there’s no way of confining that to good use by lawful credible authorities and liberal democracies,” Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the government’s National Cyber Security Centre said.
Ministers insist that they support strong encryption and privacy, but say it cannot come at the cost of public safety.
Tech companies should be researching technology to identify child sex abuse before messages are encrypted, Donelan said. But the government also appears to be searching for a way to cool the row, and Donelan insisted the measure would be a “last resort.”
“That element of the bill is like a safety mechanism that can be enacted, should it ever be needed to. It might never be needed because there might be other solutions in place,” she said.
One official in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), not authorized to speak on the record but familiar with government discussions, said DSIT wanted to find a way through and is having talks “with anyone that wants to discuss this with us.”
Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO that any efforts to break encryption in the name of safety would have to meet stringent rules, and such requests would be made in only the most extreme situations.
“There’s a high bar for Ofcom to be able to require the use of a technology in order to secure safety,” she said.
Lords debate
Peers in the unelected House of Lords, the U.K. parliament’s revising chamber, waded into the issue Thursday.
Richard Allan, a Lib Dem peer who was Facebook’s chief lobbyist in Europe until 2019, led the charge, saying tech companies will feel they’re “unable to offer their products in the UK under the bill.” He said undermining encryption opened the doors to hostile states and accused the government of playing a “high stakes game of chicken” with tech companies.
But Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer who has been leading much of the work in the Lords around child safety, said although she had some sympathy for Allan’s arguments, Big Tech companies had to do more to protect users’ privacy themselves.
Wilf Stevenson, who is managing Labour’s response to the bill in the Lords, said he was not convinced the government’s plans were “right for the present day, let alone the future.” He added that under the bill “Ofcom is expected to be both gamekeeper and poacher,” with power to regulate tech companies and inspect private messages.
But Stephen Parkinson, who is guiding the bill through the Lords on behalf of the government, defended the legislation. “The bill contains strong safeguards for privacy,” he said, echoing Donelan’s statement that powers to inspect messages were a “last resort” designed to be used only in cases of suspected terrorism and child sexual exploitation.
Convincing ministers
Messaging services including Signal and WhatsApp are hoping for a ministerial climbdown — but few see one coming.
There is little prospect of large swathes of MPs, who will have the final say on the bill, riding to their rescue, according to two former ministers who have worked on the legislation.
“People are scared if they go in and fight over this, even for very genuine reasons, it could be very easily portrayed that they’re trying to block protecting kids,” one former Cabinet minister, a party loyalist, who worked on an earlier draft of the bill, said.
The second former minister said MPs “haven’t engaged with it terribly much on a very practical level” because it is “really hard.”
“Tech companies have made significant efforts to frame this issue in the false binary that any legislation that impacts private messaging will damage end-to-end encryption and will mean that encryption will not work or is broken. That argument is completely false,” opposition Labour frontbencher Alex Davies-Jones, said in a debate last June.
The widespread leaking of MPs’ WhatsApp messages has also undermined perceptions of the platform’s privacy credentials, the former Cabinet minister quoted above suggests.
“If you are sharing stuff on WhatsApp with people that’s inappropriate, there’s a good chance it’s going to end up in the public domain anyway. The encryption doesn’t stop that because somebody screenshots it and copies it and sends it on,” they lamented.
WhatsApp does have one ally in the former Brexit secretary and long-time civil liberties campaigner David Davis, though.
“Right across the board there are a whole series of weaknesses the government hasn’t taken on board,” he told POLITICO of the bill.
And on WhatsApp and Signal’s threats to leave the U.K., Davis thinks a point could be made.
“Well, I sort of hope they do. The truth is their model depends on complete privacy,” he said.
Update: This article has been updated to include comments from the latest House of Lords debate on the Online Safety Bill.
LONDON — As Elon Musk urged humanity to get a grip on artificial intelligence, in London ministers were hailing its benefits.
Rishi Sunak’s new technology chief Michelle Donelan on Wednesday unveiled the government’s long-awaited blueprint for regulating AI, insisting a heavy-handed approach is off the agenda.
At the heart of the innovation-friendly pitch is a plan to give existing regulators a year to issue “practical guidance” for the safe use of machine learning in their sectors based on broad principles like safety, transparency, fairness and accountability. But no new legislation or regulatory bodies are being planned for the burgeoning technology.
It stands in contrast to the strategy being pursued in Brussels, where lawmakers are pushing through a more detailed rulebook, backed by a new liability regime.
Donelan insists her “common-sense, outcomes-oriented approach” will allow the U.K. to “be the best place in the world to build, test and use AI technology.”
Her department’s Twitter account was flooded with content promoting the benefits of AI. “Think AI is scary? It doesn’t have to be!” one of its posts stated on Wednesday.
But some experts fear U.K. policymakers, like their counterparts around the world, may not have grasped the scale of the challenge, and believe more urgency is needed in understanding and policing how the fast-developing tech is used.
“The government’s timeline of a year or more for implementation will leave risks unaddressed just as AI systems are being integrated at pace into our daily lives, from search engines to office suite software,” Michael Birtwistle, associate director of data and AI law and policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, said. It has “significant gaps,” which could leave harms “unaddressed,” he warned.
“We shouldn’t be risking inventing a nuclear blast before we’ve learnt how to keep it in the shell,” Connor Axiotes, a researcher at the free-market Adam Smith Institute think tank, warned.
Elon wades in
Hours before the U.K. white paper went live, across the Atlantic an open letter calling for labs to immediately pause work training AI systems to be even more powerful for at least six months went live. It was signed by artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, including Tesla and Twitter boss Elon Musk. Researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and renowned Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio were also signatories.
The letter called for AI developers to work with policymakers to “dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems,” which should “at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI.”
AI labs are locked in “an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter warned.
Rishi Sunak’s new technology chief Michelle Donelan unveiled the government’s blueprint for regulating AI, insisting a heavy-handed approach is off the agenda | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Back in the U.K., Ellen Judson, head of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, warned that the U.K. approach of “setting out principles alone” was “not enough.”
“Without the teeth of legal obligations, this is an approach which will result in a patchwork of regulatory guidance that will do little to fundamentally shift the incentives that lead to risky and unethical uses of AI,” she said.
But Technology Minister Paul Scully told the BBC he was “not sure” about pausing further AI developments. He said the government’s proposals should “dispel any of those concerns from Elon Musk and those other figures.”
“What we’re trying to do is to have a situation where we can think as government and think as a sector through the risks but also the benefits of AI — and make sure we can have a framework around this to protect us from the harms,” he said.
Long time coming
Industry concerns about the U.K.’s ability to make policy in their area are countered by some of those who have worked closely with the British government on AI policy.
Its approach to policymaking has been “very consultative,” according to Sue Daley, a director at the industry body TechUK, who has been closely following AI developments for a number of years.
In 2018 ministers set up the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the Office for AI, working across the government’s digital and business departments until it moved to the newly-created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology earlier this year.
The Office for AI is staffed by a “good team of people,” Daly said, while also pointing to the work the U.K.’s well-regarded regulators, like the Information Commissioner’s Office, had been doing on artificial intelligence “for some time.”
Greg Clark, the Conservative chairman of parliament’s science and technology committee, said he thought the government was right to “think carefully.” The former business secretary stressed that is his own view rather than the committee view.
“There’s a danger in rushing to adopt extensive regulations precipitously that have not been properly thought through and stress-tested, and that could prove to be an encumbrance to us and could impede the positive applications of AI,” he added. But he said the government should “proceed quickly” from white paper to regulatory framework “during the months ahead.”
Public view
Outside Westminster, the potential implications of the technology are yet to be fully realized, surveys suggest.
Public First, a Westminster-based consultancy, which conducted a raft of polling into public attitudes to artificial intelligence earlier this month, found that beyond fears about unemployment, people were pretty positive about AI.
“It certainly pales into insignificance compared to the other things that they are worried about like the prospect of armed conflict, or even the impact of climate change,” James Frayne, a founding partner of Public First, who conducted the polling said. “This falls way down the priority list,” he said.
But he cautioned this could change.
“One assumes that at some point there will be an event which shocks them, and shakes them, and makes them think very differently about AI,” he added.
“At that point there will be great demands for the government to make sure that they’re all over this in terms of regulation. They will expect the government to not only move very quickly, but to have made significant progress already,” he said.
LONDON — The U.K. government was scrambling on Sunday to limit the fallout for the British tech sector from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a big U.S. lender to many startups and technology companies.
The government is treating the potential reverberations as “a high priority” after a run on deposits drove California-based SVB into insolvency, marking the largest bank failure since the global financial crisis, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said in a statement Sunday morning. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other policymakers were on alert that problems at SVB could spread.
Hunt said the British government is working on a plan to backstop the cashflow needs of companies affected by SVB’s implosion and the halt in trading of its British unit, Silicon Valley Bank UK. The Bank of England announced on Friday that the U.K. unit is set to enter insolvency.
Silicon Valley Bank’s “failure could have a significant impact on the liquidity of the tech ecosystem,” Hunt said.
The government is working “to avoid or minimize damage to some of our most promising companies in the U.K.,” the chancellor said. “We will bring forward immediate plans to ensure the short-term operational and cashflow needs of Silicon Valley Bank UK customers are able to be met.”
Hunt told the BBC Sunday morning that the government would have a plan that deals with the operational cashflow needs of companies “in the next few days.”
Discussions between the governor of the Bank of England, the prime minister and the chancellor were taking place over the weekend, according to the statement.
Speaking on Sky News Sunday morning, Hunt said that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey had made it clear that there was “no systemic risk to our financial system.” But Hunt warned that there was a “serious risk” to the technology and life-sciences sectors in the U.K.
Ministers held talks with the tech industry on Saturday after tech executives in an open letter warned Hunt that the SVB collapse posed an “existential threat” to the U.K. tech sector. They called for government intervention.
Britain’s science and technology minister on Saturday pledged to do “everything we can” to limit the repercussions on U.K. tech companies.
Michelle Donelan, who heads the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said in a tweet: “We recognize that the tech sector is often not cashflow positive as they grow and I am determined to stand with them as we do everything we can to minimize impact on the sector.”
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said protecting the U.K. sector from the impacts of SVB’s collapse was a “high priority” | Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images
A bank insolvency procedure for Silicon Valley Bank UK would mean eligible depositors would be paid the protected limit of £85,000, or up to £170,000 for joint accounts.
The Bank of England said in its Friday statement that SVB UK “has a limited presence in the U.K. and no critical functions supporting the financial system.”
LONDON — Britain was rebuffed by the Biden administration after multiple requests to develop an advanced trade and technology dialogue similar to structures the U.S. set up with the European Union.
On visits to Washington as a Cabinet minister over the past two years, Liz Truss urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior Biden administration officials to intensify talks with the U.K. to build clean technology supply chains and boost collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors.
After Truss became prime minister in fall 2022, the idea was floated again when Raimondo visited London last October, people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO. But fear of angering the U.S.’s European partners and the U.K.’s diminished status outside the EU post-Brexit have posed barriers to influencing Washington.
Businesses, lawmakers and experts worry the U.K. is being left on the sidelines.
“We tried many times,” said a former senior Downing Street official, of the British government’s efforts to set up a U.K. equivalent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), noting Truss’ overtures began as trade chief in July 2021. They requested anonymity to speak on sensitive issues.
“We did speak to Gina Raimondo about that, saying ‘we think it would be a good opportunity,’” said the former official — not necessarily to join the EU-U.S. talks directly, “but to increase trilateral cooperation.”
Set up in June 2021, the TTC forum co-chaired by Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. trade chief Katherine Tai gives their EU counterparts, Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis, a direct line to shape tech and trade policy.
The U.S. is pushing forward with export controls on advanced semiconductors to China; forging new secure tech supply chains away from Beijing; and spurring innovation through subsidies for cutting-edge green technology and microprocessors.
The TTC’s 10 working groups with the EU, Raimondo said in an interview late last year, “set the standards,” though Brussels has rebuffed Washington’s efforts to use the transatlantic body to go directly after Beijing.
But the U.K. “is missing the boat on not being completely engaged in that dialogue,” said a U.S.-based representative of a major business group. “There has been some discussion about the U.K. perhaps joining the TTC,” they confirmed, and “it was kind of mooted, at least in private” with Raimondo by the Truss administration on her visit to London last October.
The response from the U.S. had been ‘’let’s work with what we’ve got at the moment,’” said the former Downing Street official.
Even if the U.S. does want to talk, “they don’t want to irritate the Europeans,” the same former official added. Right now the U.K.’s conversations with the U.S. on these issues are “ad hoc” under the new Atlantic Charter Boris Johnson and Joe Biden signed around the G7 summit in 2021, they said, and “nothing institutional.”
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up | Pool photo by Olivier Matthys/AFP via Getty Images
Securing British access to the U.S.-EU tech forum or an equivalent was also discussed when CBI chief Tony Danker was in Washington last July, said people familiar with conversations during his visit.
The U.K.’s science and tech secretary, Michelle Donelan, confirmed the British government had discussed establishing a more regular channel for tech and trade discussions with the U.S., both last October and more recently. “My officials have just been out [to the U.S.],” she told POLITICO. “They’ve had very productive conversations.”
A U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. remains committed to working closely with the U.S. and EU to further our shared trade and technology objectives, through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S.-U.K. Future of Atlantic Trade dialogues, and the U.K.-U.S. technology partnership.
“We will continue to advance U.K. interests in trade and technology and explore further areas of cooperation with partners where it is mutually beneficial.”
Britain the rule-taker?
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up. Senior officials hoped to get a deal securing the free flow of data between the U.S. and U.K. across the line and addressed similar issues as the TTC.
They couldn’t secure the data deal. The U.K. is expected to join a U.S.-led effort to expand data transfer rules baked into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trading agreement as soon as this year, according to a former and a current British official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The next formal meeting between the U.K. and U.S. is penciled in for January 2024.
Ongoing dialogue “is vital to secure an overarching agreement on U.K.-U.S. data flows, without which modern day business cannot function,” said William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “It would also provide an opportunity to set the ground rules around a host of other technological developments.”
In contrast, the U.S. and EU are always at work, with TTC officials in constant contact with the operation — though questions have been raised about how long-term the transatlantic cooperation is likely to prove, ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Unless you have a structured system or set up, often overseen by ministers, you don’t really get the drive to actually get things done,” said the former Downing Street official.
Right now cooperation with the U.S. on tech issues is not as intense or structured as desired, the same former official said, and is “not really brought together” in one central forum.
Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy | Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images
“This initiative [the TTC] between the world’s two regulatory powerhouses risks sidelining the U.K.,” warned lawmakers on the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in a report last October. Britain may become “a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker,” MPs noted, citing the government’s “ambiguous” position on technology standards. Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy, and others on critical minerals — like those used in EV batteries — or AI are also missing.
Over the last two years, U.S. trade chief Tai has “spoken regularly to her three successive U.K. counterparts to identify and tackle shared economic and trade priorities,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative, adding “we intend to continue strengthening this partnership in the years to come.”
All eyes on Europe
For its part, the EU has to date shown little interest in closer cooperation with the U.K.
Three European Commission officials disregarded the likelihood of Britain joining the club, though one of those officials said that London may be asked to join — alongside other like-minded countries — for specific discussions related to ongoing export bans against Russia.
Even with last week’s breakthrough over the Northern Ireland protocol calming friction between London and Brussels, the U.K. was not a priority country for involvement in the TTC, added another of the EU officials.
“The U.K. was extremely keen to be part of a dialogue of some sort of equivalent of TTC,” said a senior business representative in London, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive issues.
U.K. firms see “the Holy Grail” as Britain, the U.S. and EU working together on this, they said. “We’re very keen to see a triangular dialogue at some point.”
The U.K.’s haggling with the EU over the details of the Northern Ireland protocol governing trade in the region has posed “a political obstacle” to realizing that vision, they suggested.
Yet with a solution to the dispute announced in late February, the same business figure said, “there will be a more prominent push to work together with the U.K.”
TTC+
Some trade experts think the UK would increase its chances of accession to the TTC if it submitted a joint request with other nations.
But prior to that happening, “I think the EU-U.S. TTC will need to first deliver bilaterally,” said Sabina Ciofu, an international tech policy expert at the trade body techUK.
Representatives speak to the media following the Trade and Technology Council Meeting in Maryland | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
When there is momentum, Ciofu said, the U.K. should join forces with Japan, South Korea and other advanced economies to ask for a TTC+ that could include the G7 or other partners. At the last TTC meeting in December, U.S. and EU officials said they were open to such an expansion around specific topics that had global significance.
But not all trade experts think this is essential. Andy Burwell, director of international trade at the CBI, said he doesn’t “think it necessarily matters” whether the U.K. has a structured conversation with the U.S. like the TTC forum.
Off the back of a soon-to-be-published refresh of the Integrated Review — the U.K.’s national security and foreign policy strategy — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should instead seize the opportunity, Burwell said, to pinpoint where Britain is “going to own, collaborate and have access to various aspects of the supply chains.”
The G7, Burwell said, “could be the right platform for having some of those conversations.”
Yet the “danger with the ad hoc approach with lots of different people is incoherence,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above.
Too many countries involved in setting the standards can, the former official said, “create difficulty in leveraging what you want — which is all of the countries agreeing together on a certain way forward … especially when you’re dealing with issues that relate to, for example, China.”
Additional reporting by Mark Scott, Annabelle Dickson and Tom Bristow
LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.
Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.
The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused.
Long and winding road
Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.
The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations.
Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.
“This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”
Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.
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Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott
LONDON — If his key appointments are any indication, the Rishi Sunak era in Britain could actually be … kind of dull.
The new U.K. leader reappointed existing ministers, brought back old hands and largely kept critics on side as he sought to reassure nervous markets, allies and enemies that the U.K. is no longer a hotbed of chaos.
But the prime minister did, at least, have room to take revenge on a number of his most vocal detractors, and refused to offer any kind of promotion to his defeated leadership rival, Penny Mordaunt.
Sunak entered No. 10 Downing Street Tuesday with a promise to “fix” the “mistakes” made by his predecessor Liz Truss, after her radical economic prospectus spooked financial markets and helped jack up U.K. borrowing costs — swiftly bringing down her government amid bitter Tory recriminations and sparking a second Tory leadership race in two months.
Emerging from the wreckage of the Conservative Party, Sunak had pledged to put politics aside and “build a government that represents the very best traditions of my party.”
Nothing to see here
The biggest news of the reshuffle was that there wasn’t much news. Multiple figures who served under Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss, including some who backed his rival Boris Johnson in the latest Conservative leadership race, kept their posts or were moved to other senior roles.
Sunak’s most important appointment was to keep Jeremy Hunt in post as chancellor, sticking by a Cabinet veteran who Truss had brought in from the cold just two weeks earlier to rip up her failed economic agenda.
James Cleverly was kept on as foreign secretary, while Ben Wallace remained as defense secretary — keeping two key ministries tasked with shaping Britain’s foreign policy intact. Chris Heaton-Harris stayed on as Northern Ireland secretary, while Nadhim Zahawi was moved from the Cabinet Office to become the Conservative Party chairman. All four men had backed Johnson in the leadership contest last week, leaving fellow Boris supporters in the party relieved.
“At this early stage of the reshuffle it looks as if Rishi is aiming to unite the party rather than divide it,” said Tory MP and Johnson ally Michael Fabricant. “Perhaps one of the mistakes Liz Truss made was to pack the Cabinet only with her supporters. That always creates a volatile situation.”
In an eyebrow-raising move, Suella Braverman, a darling of the party’s right who made her own bid for the leadership earlier this year, returned as home secretary less than a week after being fired over a sensitive information leak. Her reappointment looked like a debt being repaid following her unexpected backing of Sunak at the weekend.
Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch and Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan, both Truss picks over the summer, kept their jobs too.
One Cabinet minister who did not back Sunak in either leadership race said the appointments were clearly a bid for unity: “He has put people in positions with a track record of delivery.”
Senior figures from other wings of the party were impressed too. “The new prime minister is clearly serious about including people from all sides of the party in his new Cabinet,” said Nicky Morgan, a former chair of the centrist One Nation Conservatives grouping in parliament and now a member of the House of Lords. “This is a very encouraging start to his term.”
Soft revenge
Others key allies of Sunak’s opponents were handed demotions, but allowed to remain in Sunak’s top team.
Thérèse Coffey, a close friend of Truss who served as her deputy prime minister and health secretary, was demoted to the environment, food and farming brief. Alok Sharma, who backed Johnson in the second race, kept his job overseeing the COP climate summits, but will no longer attend Cabinet — a clear step down.
But it was the treatment of Mordaunt, the last candidate standing against Sunak in the latest leadership race, that most ruffled feathers. She kept her relatively junior Cabinet-attending job as leader of the House of Commons, a decision seen in Westminster as a snub given widespread expectations that she was due a major promotion.
One former Cabinet minister argued the failure to promote Mordaunt looked like “an act of revenge, or small-mindedness.” Mordaunt had refused to drop out of the latest leadership race until it was clear she did not have sufficient nominations from fellow MPs to make the next round.
Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt leaves No. 10 Downing Street following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Yet some argued the very act of keeping her in post was in itself an olive branch, while one person familiar with the discussions on her appointment said she had been offered a different role, but refused it. One of Mordaunt’s allies insisted she was pleased to keep her existing brief.
A Downing Street official insisted: “This Cabinet brings the talents of the party together. It reflects a unified party and a Cabinet with significant experience, ensuring that at this uncertain time there is continuity at the heart of government.”
But there were plenty of rewards too for key Sunak supporters. Close allies Oliver Dowden, Michael Gove and Steve Barclay were handed roles in the Cabinet Office, communities department and health department respectively, just weeks after Truss made clear they had no place in her administration.
Simon Hart was made chief whip, while Gillian Keegan was promoted to the Cabinet for the first time as education secretary and Grant Shapps was moved from his week-long stint heading up the Home Office (to replace the sacked Braverman) to the business department.
To make space for the new appointments, Sunak allowed himself a few ruthless sackings — although he did permit Cabinet ministers to technically resign to spare their blushes.
Ministers seen as close to Johnson, including Brandon Lewis and Kit Malthouse, were fired, as was Robert Buckland, who supported Sunak in the first leadership race only to shamelessly switch to Truss when it became clear she would win.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of Sunak’s most vocal critics and a cheerleader for Johnson, was also dispensed with, as well as top Truss lieutenants Ranil Jayawarenda and Simon Clarke. Rees-Mogg had once branded Sunak a “socialist” — although he hastily recanted that criticism Tuesday morning as the new PM picked his top team.
Having told the Tories at the weekend they must “Back Boris” or go “bust”, it was not enough to save him from his fate.
An earlier version of this story included an inaccurate previous ministerial brief.
