Westminster Hall
15 October 2026
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Westminster Hall Actual start House of Commons
Follow its sittings15:25 - 15:26
Speaker 1
Order, order.
15:26 - 15:59
Speaker 3
We begin with the Select Committee statement. Alex Sobel will speak on the publication of the fourth report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Human Rights and the Regulation of AI, HC 160, for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of his statement, I will call members to put questions on the subject of the statement and call Alex Sobel to respond to these in turn. Questions should be brief and members may only ask one question each. I call Alex Sobel, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
15:59 - 19:18
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Chair. As the newly elected chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I'm proud to be presenting the significant findings of the fourth report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on Human Rights and the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence.
But I'd first like to thank Lord Alton for his exemplary leadership and service as the chair of our committee. All the evidence suggests that the world is at the precipice of the outcomes of a reckless race towards superintelligent AI, AI that can fully replace and outmatch humans at any task. Our report found that no cross-economy regulators, agencies or bodies have systemic powers to prevent AI models or systems being deployed even if they pose significant risks. Regulators lack the power to test and evaluate AI systems before they are publicly released or to prevent their release if they are considered to pose unacceptable risks, except in very limited circumstances. Our existing copyright laws will not stop the onset of superintelligent AI in the UK.
Model developers engage the AI Security Institute on a voluntary basis.
The AI Security Institute has no statutory power. The committee found that AI indeed threatens the human rights of people in the UK and elsewhere. We welcome the Prime Minister accepting one of our key recommendations that the government should use its G20 presidency to address AI harms. That being said, with the speed and turbulence frontier developers are hurtling towards unleashing superintelligent AI, we must regulate now. Not in a year, not in five years, but now.
And with the G20 in mind, we should seek a global agreement on standards and regulations next year.
The committee has concentrated on the key principles identified in the Council of Europe's framework convention as being fundamental to the protection of human rights, equality and non-discrimination, and privacy and personal data protection. The committee defined that AI systems are machine systems that perceive, learn, and act. AI is now widely used across a diverse range of purposes, from email spam filters through to powerful tools for scientific discovery. AI systems are being incorporated into more complex AI agents. These are small, specialized pieces of software that can make decisions and operate cooperatively or independently to achieve pre-specified objectives.
A fundamental aspect of current AI systems is their capacity to operate with varying degrees of autonomy and adaptiveness. Some AI models operate in ways that are so mathematically complex that their outputs are opaque even to an informed expert. The general-purpose AI systems used today are not coded line by line, but use vast amounts of data and are grown, not built.
This results in systems which nobody fully understands or can reliably predict. Let me be clear: AI is the crucial technology of the 21st century, vital to effective defence and promoting vast benefits for science, medicine, and the UK's prosperity. However, there are many ways in which AI may adversely affect human rights. In particular, witnesses during our inquiry told us of potential impacts on the treatment and condition of workers, workers' rights generally, and on the environment. Furthermore, companies are spending billions to make super-intelligent AI a reality.
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