Speeches by Rigby.

“The Treasury would have to go through the relevant assessments and take the relevant steps within them. I think I am right in saying that there would then need to be regulations. At that point it would become public that a third party was being designated. It is absolutely right that the critical third parties regime i…”

“I will let my officials answer that question. However, when it comes to specifics and the naming of companies—I know you will appreciate this, Dame Harriett—that is commercially and market sensitive.”

“The short answer is yes, I suspect that there will be.”

“I am happy to, and James and Catherine can jump in afterwards if necessary. As I have referred to in relation to Mr Grady’s question, the answer from the banks and the FCA, whose judgment is important alongside ours, is that they have the right skills. However, because the technology is changing, the need for people wi…”

“I personally am not, when it comes to my brief. I know that my officials, rather than my private office, use AI, for example, in the production of some of my briefings. That is one way in which the Treasury is using AI. As a Department, we were one of the first adopters of an LLM, and we have our own LLM.”

“Sorry: a large language model. It might be called the HMT LLM or something as intuitive as that.”

“HMT-GPT—there we go. There are a number of ways in which the technology is used at the Treasury, including email triaging, chatbots and the use of Microsoft Copilot chat. As I say, we have our own LLM.”

“Yes.”

“I will bring Catherine in on this.”

“It is important to say that we have a good pre-existing framework of monitoring risks when it comes to financial stability, as indeed does the Bank. We monitor all operational incidents very carefully. The recent outage in relation to AWS triggered the usual process, and that process was conducted, but the reason why t…”

“We have had good engagement with a number of companies as part of the regime. As I said in answer to Dame Harriett, we expect some designations.”

“I think I am right in saying—James will correct me—that it is recommendations from the regulator, not the industry.”

“There is potential for that, but I hesitate to answer the question directly. I will hand it to James.”

“That is at the root of why it was felt necessary to introduce the critical third parties regime, which can designate companies no matter where they are based. Once they are designated, they come within the purview of the financial regulators, and the regulators can impose conditions on the provision of services, and in…”

“I would be very, very surprised if that were not the case.”

“We can confirm that in writing.”

“There are a number of things there around concentration risk when it comes to AI and financial services, but the Government’s approach to both is to ensure British success. You mentioned the American money going in. There is a lot of emphasis in our FS growth strategy on capital markets. Some of the retail investment s…”

“We are developing our own sovereign capability. I say that outside the FS context, in a broader AI context. In the globalised world we live in—I say this in relation to FS, which is obviously extremely globalised, but so too is AI—we know we cannot be independent, but what we can be is more resilient and more secure. B…”

“Well, cloud is not the same as AI, but I take the point that you are making, Chair.”

“Yes, there is a concentration, as there is in many areas of tech.”