On 20 April 2025, an official in the British government emailed their colleagues a story from that day’s Financial Times. The headline read: “UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first”. The officials, all of whom are involved in implementing AI in the running of the British state, read the article with amusement. “We were tempted to say: ‘We got there first,’” one of them told me. But they felt that the UK was “not fighting for the crown of the first AI-written line of legislation”, so they decided not to make public a fact very few people know: text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.
This is a matter of sovereignty. The software products we refer to as “AI” are all built on advanced “foundational models” from the US and China. This is a technology we do not control, but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers’ briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses AI to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford – where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated – is now being educated with the help of OpenAI. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it’s being pursued by a government that believes AI software could solve all its problems.
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall