United KingdomAI regulation

Regulation Status

• The UK still has no comprehensive, binding AI-specific statute; a promised bill to regulate the most powerful frontier models has been repeatedly delayed, the May 2026 King's Speech flagged a 'Regulating for Growth' AI bill, and ministers have resisted aligning with the EU AI Act.
• The UK follows a sectoral, pro-innovation approach: existing regulators apply the AI principles in the 2023 National AI Regulation White Paper, and the 2025 AI Opportunities Action Plan (with AI Growth Zones and a later AI Growth Labs blueprint) drives deployment, while regulators such as the ICO, CMA, Ofcom, MHRA and FCA are highly active on generative AI, online-safety harms, competition in foundation models and sector testbeds.
• The UK hosted the 2023 Global AI Safety Summit (Bletchley Declaration) and created the AI Safety Institute, renamed the AI Security Institute in 2025, which now publishes a research agenda, evaluations of frontier models and a frontier trends report; the UK has also signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI (2024).
• AI-relevant law is advancing piecemeal rather than via a single statute: the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 is in force (its non-consensual deepfake intimate-image offence effective since January 2026), the Data Protection Act 2018 (Code of Practice on AI and Automated Decision-Making) Regulations entered into force in May 2026, and the government's 2025 Statement of Progress signals a licensing-led copyright framework for AI training, while a private member's Artificial Intelligence (Regulation) Bill was reintroduced in 2025 and an Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill was introduced in September 2026 to prohibit ASI development, deployment and operation and create monitoring and control powers.