Government tables long-awaited AI Safety and Innovation Bill
After more than a year of consultation, the Government has introduced the AI Safety and Innovation Bill in the House of Commons. It places the UK's AI Safety Institute on a statutory footing and creates a tiered duty of care for developers of the most capable general-purpose AI systems.
The Bill is the first piece of horizontal AI legislation introduced by a UK government and follows a deliberately narrower scope than the European Union's AI Act. Ministers have stuck to the principle that most sector-specific regulation should continue to be delivered by existing regulators — the FCA, MHRA, Ofcom, the ICO and others — under joint coordination.
Who it applies to
The duty-of-care provisions apply only to developers of "advanced general-purpose AI systems", defined by training compute thresholds and broad capability indicators rather than by sector. The Secretary of State retains the power to revise the thresholds annually by statutory instrument, in light of an updated assessment from the AI Safety Institute.
For systems below the threshold — which covers the overwhelming majority of UK-deployed AI applications — there are no new compliance obligations beyond existing law. Officials say this is a deliberate design choice to avoid duplicating GDPR, the Online Safety Act, the Equality Act 2010 and product safety regulations.
What developers have to do
- Submit a pre-deployment safety case for frontier systems to the AI Safety Institute, including red-team results and a mitigation plan for catastrophic misuse risks.
- Maintain a serious incident reporting channel and notify within 72 hours of becoming aware.
- Publish summary model cards, with the technical detail held confidentially with the Institute.
- Cooperate with structured evaluation requests during a defined pre-release window.
Industry reaction
The largest UK-headquartered AI labs welcomed the Bill's structure, which broadly mirrors voluntary commitments already in place. Several international developers said they wanted clarity on extraterritorial scope: the Bill applies to any frontier system "made available" in the UK, regardless of where the developer is based.
Civil society groups gave a mixed verdict. The Ada Lovelace Institute and Open Rights Group welcomed the move from voluntary to statutory footing, but warned that the duty of care is narrowly drafted and may leave significant downstream harms — particularly bias and labour market impacts — without enforceable obligations.
Second Reading is scheduled for early July.
