Making sense of the current options for AI regulation in ...

The Commons' Business and Trade Committee has formally requested sight of the government's proposals for AI regulation — not the legislation, note, not a bill with a number on it, but the proposals, the bit that comes before the bit. The Ada Lovelace Institute has responded with a whole feature titled 'Making sense of the current options', which is the title you reach for when there are options and nobody can make sense of them. The same committee has asked the AI Security Institute and — generously — AI companies to give evidence. Getting industry to explain which rules it would like to be governed by is either deep consultation or a hostage video with better lighting.

Then there is Dame Chi Onwurah, who chairs the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee and has urged the government to bring forward AI legislation. Her argument is the sharpest thing in the piece: a framework 'driven and designed by industry risks entrenching incumbents rather than protecting the public.' She is right, and the sentence has a lovely doomed quality, like a fire-safety notice read aloud in a building that is already, technically, on fire. Two select committees, one absent bill, one AI Security Institute being summoned to describe a regulatory settlement that has not been written. The industry being asked for its views is also the industry that would be entrenched, which is either a consultation or a self-assessment.

None of this is new, which is the point. The UK has spent years making sense of options while the options multiplied and the legislation did not arrive. Every model released in the meantime makes the eventual bill land later and fit worse — the standard regulatory arithmetic in which the subject grows faster than the sentence written to describe it. When the framework finally appears it will have been designed by the industry that wanted it, the incumbents will be entrenched exactly as Onwurah foretold, and the Ada Lovelace Institute will publish a follow-up. Titles with ellipses almost always get sequels.