Cross-Party Report Warns Britain's AI Laws Are 'Not Fit for Purpose'

A cross-party group of MPs and peers has identified human rights risks posed by artificial intelligence and argued that existing laws are ill-equipped to address the technology's rapid growth. The Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report calling for a new bill on AI to address the scale and seriousness of such threats. "Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose," said Alex Sobel, the Labour MP who chairs the committee.

Georgia Gould, the Labour education minister, said AI was creating opportunities but that it was critical the government was responding to the risks it posed. In a summary of its 100-page report, the committee argued that AI has already been responsible for numerous abuses of human rights. It cited the use of the technology to create sexualised images of women and girls, and the scanning of people's faces without their consent.

The committee advocated the creation of a "single, independent AI oversight body... on a statutory basis", saying the present legal framework is fragmented and difficult to navigate, leaving gaps in protection. It called for more demanding obligations for higher-risk AI systems and models at every stage of what it termed the AI lifecycle. Some uses, it concluded, should be prohibited outright because they are incompatible with human rights, with subliminal techniques and the inappropriate use of profiling or biometric data among the potential areas for action.

Sobel said AI was heralded as an unprecedented era of technological development with the potential to transform lives for better or worse. "It is moving with such speed and complexity that its impact is hard to accurately predict," he said. "What is clear is that at present we are unprepared to deal with its consequences however potentially dire they may be." The committee's 12 members are drawn from both Houses and currently include MPs and peers from the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.

Monday's report lands amid growing anxiety about the challenges AI presents. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who quit Anthropic, told the BBC this weekend that staff developing such systems were genuinely frightened for the future of humanity. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company was building models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry.

Labour's 2024 general election manifesto promised to ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful systems. The government used the King's Speech in July 2024 to commit to bringing forward appropriate legislation, but no dedicated AI bill appeared in this year's King's Speech. Asked what had become of the promised law, Gould told BBC Breakfast that the government had been regulating, pointing to action on non-consensual sexualised deepfakes and a bill linked to cyber security. "There is action happening and we're continuing to really carefully monitor the rise of AI, the way the technology is evolving and making sure we're staying alongside it, and we have some of the best people in the world doing that work," she said.

Gould said the AI Security Institute was working through challenges coming in the future and testing models as they arrive in the UK, and that international co-operation was essential. Following his arrival in Downing Street in July, Prime Minister Andy Burnham ensured the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, would attend cabinet meetings after scrapping the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and dividing its responsibilities among other departments.

On Saturday, Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, set out a plan calling for the regulation of AI. It included global rules, industry-wide regulation and independent monitoring of models as they are developed. He also urged that the pace of development be slowed, and the bosses of two rival firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, said they agreed with him. Among the human rights concerns raised in recent years is that AI can display bias against particular groups when trained on large datasets scraped from the internet, material that can include racist, sexist and otherwise undesirable content. The technology can also be used to create and spread misinformation.