UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced plans to seek new parliamentary powers to regulate AI chatbots, specifically targeting their impact on child safety. In a direct address to the public via Substack and on social media platform X, Starmer stated the government intends to tighten existing online safety laws to ensure AI chatbot providers are "firmly in scope." This initiative builds upon recent actions, including a ban on nudification apps and the criminalization of non-consensual intimate images.
The proposed regulatory powers, pending public consultation, would allow the government to: implement a minimum age of 16 for social media access, block features like autoplay and infinite scroll that keep children "hooked to their screens," and restrict minors' access to VPNs used to circumvent age limits. Starmer criticized the previous Conservative government's pace, vowing to implement these changes "in a matter of months" rather than years.
The push comes amid international alarm following a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated that xAI's Grok chatbot generated 23,338 sexualized images of children in just 11 days—roughly one every 41 seconds. Evin McMullen, CEO of Billions.Network, criticized such practices, stating, "Loosening guardrails to juice metrics in the short term is a reckless gamble when the fallout includes child exploitation material flooding platforms."
UK regulators are already involved, with both Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office opening probes into X earlier this month over "serious concerns under UK data protection law." Ofcom warned it could seek court-backed measures to block the platform if found non-compliant.
The announcement has drawn criticism from opposition figures like Reform UK Chairman David Bull, who called the government "out of control." It has also triggered a potential international legal conflict. U.S. attorney Preston Byrne, author of the proposed GRANITE Act—a U.S. shield law against foreign censorship orders—warned that any UK attempt to target U.S. VPN providers would trigger immediate legal retaliation.
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, now a senior adviser to Microsoft, urged Starmer to treat AI as an economic opportunity, warning that failure to drive adoption risks leaving Britain as "a theme park for historically curious tourists." He noted the UK fell from 8th to 9th in Microsoft's global rankings of workplace AI adoption between the first and second halves of 2025.
