Britain Falls Under Pressure To Relax Regulations On AI

Uploaded on 2025-04-09 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, NEWS-Cybersecurity News, GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW

In a recently published report, the influential Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has urged the British government to relax copyright laws in order to let Artificial Intelligence (AI) firms build new products, as it warned that a restrictive approach could place pressure the US relationship.

The former Prime Minister Blair founded TBI on the belief that a country’s success and ability to enact transformational change is dependent on the effectiveness of its governance.

Now, the TBI said enforcing restrictive copyright measures would have the effect of straining UK relations with the new US administration of Donald Trump

Warning that geopolitical considerations require “urgent and adequate attention” while AI policy is being drafted, TBI said: “Without similar provisions in the United States, it would be hard for the UK government to enforce strict copyright laws without straining the transatlantic relationship it has so far sought to nurture.”

The TBI has said that if the UK was to demand licencing of all UK content used in AI models, it would simply push that development work to other territories where there are less strict copyright laws.

To enforce a strict licencing model, the UK would also need to restrict access to models that have been trained on such content, which could include US-owned AI systems. The TBI said it backed government proposals to let AI firms train their models on copyright-protected material without permission, unless creatives have signalled they want to opt out of the process.

With the Trump administration signalling it will not pursue strict AI regulations and China pursuing AI growth at “breakneck speed”, the UK could weaken its economic and national security interests by lagging in the AI race, said TBI.

“If the UK imposes laws that are too strict, it risks falling behind in the AI-driven economy and weakening its capacity to protect national security interests,” said TBI.

The report said arguing that commercial AI models cannot be trained on content from the open web was close to saying knowledge workers, a broad category of professionals ranging from lawyers to researchers, cannot profit from insights they get when reading the same content. Rather than fighting to uphold outdated regulations, said TBI, rights holders and policymakers should help build a future where creativity is valued alongside AI innovation.

According to the TBI, a more restrictive approach to copyright than the one taken by the EU, Singapore or Japan risked pushing AI developers out of the UK.

Image: Ideogram

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