For Peter Kyle, the ambitious new Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Tuesday, July 9, was a red letter day. The former special adviser to Tony Blair had just been handed a plum seat in Sir Keir Starmer’s first Cabinet. Now it was time to knuckle down to work.

A minister’s diary is packed at the best of times. But on this, his second ‘proper’ day at 100 Parliament Street, the department’s majestic Whitehall headquarters, things were particularly tight.

Not only did the MP for Hove have to get to grips with running a sprawling arm of Government that employs around 1,700 civil servants, he was also expected to trot over to the House of Commons, where Parliament was meeting for the first time since the previous week’s General Election to elect its new speaker.

Yet despite pressure on his time, Kyle was somehow able to carve out space in his hectic schedule to hold no fewer than four face-to-face meetings with Big Tech lobbyists.

First, he sat down for a cosy chat with executives from Apple. Then he met their contemporaries at Google, followed by a team from Amazon. And finally came the turn of Meta, the Silicon Valley business that owns Facebook.

Each of that day’s four encounters was described in the official register of ministerial appointments as an ‘introductory meeting to discuss priorities for the Government’.

The chinwags started some beautiful friendships. For over the ensuing three months (the only period for which records are yet available) Kyle chose to meet with the same four American companies on nine further occasions.

Importantly, according to public disclosures, they used many of these precious audiences to bend his ear about their latest cash cow: ‘artificial intelligence’ or AI.

Peter Kyle held a series of meetings with Big Tech firms once he took up his position as the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

Records reveal that the minister hosted them at an ‘AI tech breakfast’ on July 31, a ‘roundtable to discuss AI regulation’ on August 14, and so on.

They weren’t the only AI firms to gain precious access to Kyle, either. A slew of other companies, large and small, were also given remarkable amounts of face-time by the minister during this period.

One might argue he granted stakeholders in this cash-soaked new industry revolving-door access to the heart of Government.

Microsoft was invited to meet with him four times. Nvidia, the maker of chips that power AI computers, got in twice. DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of Google, came to talk ‘AI regulation’. A firm called CoreWeave talked the minister through its thoughts about his ‘AI Action Plan,’ while a rival named Anthropic badgered him about ‘AI opportunities’.

The fact is, astonishingly, that somewhere between 25 and 30 of the 42 external meetings that Kyle would hold, during his first three months in office, ended up being with businesses seeking to profit from AI or with experts on the industry, or from their lobbyists and supporters including his old chum Tony Blair, who popped in for a chat on September 12.

A few weeks earlier, Blair had given a speech calling for the UK to grasp ‘the full opportunity of governing in the age of artificial intelligence’ by using AI to revolutionise public services. Sceptical media coverage pointed out his think-tank has been receiving hundreds of millions of pounds from the tech sector in recent years.

It all added up to an epic lobbying campaign, perhaps unprecedented in modern politics. And the AI industry’s relationship with Kyle has already yielded valuable results.

Earlier this month, for example, the UK Government refused to sign a declaration, endorsed by 60 other countries following a summit in Paris, calling for the industry to behave in a way that is, among other things, ‘ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy’.

Some lucrative public contracts were meanwhile recently signed with AI firms, including the minister’s friends in Anthropic, who are being paid £3million to help introduce AI ‘chatbots’ to government websites.

Tony Blair last year gave a speech calling for the UK to grasp ‘the full opportunity of governing in the age of artificial intelligence’ by using AI to revolutionise public services

Kyle himself summed things up by declaring: ‘We’re putting AI at the heart of the Government’s agenda to boost growth and improve our public services.’

There is, however, a problem. Namely: not everyone sees AI, and the ruthless US tech giants behind it, through the minister’s rose-tinted lens. In fact, a growing number of critics, in both politics and business, believe that Kyle’s love-in with the ‘Big Tech bros’ is coming at a huge cost.

At the centre of their concerns is the first significant piece of proposed AI legislation to emerge from Kyle’s department: a new set of laws governing ‘copyright and artificial intelligence’.

Published just before Christmas, and currently the subject of an official consultation, the mooted rules govern the ways in which tech firms use the internet to train their AI systems. At present, creators of music, literature and art are automatically protected by strict copyright laws that make it illegal for others to commercially exploit their content without paying for the privilege.

They have been established in UK law for more than 300 years, and in theory require AI firms to seek permission from the copyright holder (and usually pay for it) before exploiting their material.

Tech entrepreneurs did not become the most wealthy human beings in history by dipping into their pockets without being forced to, though.

They currently seem to prefer using data-gathering tools to ‘scrape’ information from the internet – without bothering to pay the person or organisation that actually owns it.

Among those with first-hand experience of this process is Labour MP Alison Hume, who worked as a screenwriter before entering politics. She recently

told Parliament how subtitles for an episode of a TV show she had written called New Tricks had been ‘scraped’ by an AI program which is learning how to produce copycat scripts.

She said: ‘Along with thousands of other films and TV shows, my work is being used by generative AI to write scripts which one day may replace versions produced by mere humans like me. This is theft, and it’s happening on an industrial scale.’

Similar larceny is threatening to disrupt the music business, where AI programs trained on the back catalogue of a real-life artist such as Sir Elton John could in theory produce seemingly original new songs in his style.

In 2023, a song that used AI to clone the performers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media, much to the apparent displeasure of both real-life artists.

Also in the firing line are everyone from writers (bots trained on JK Rowling’s back catalogue could, for example, churn out fake novels inspired by Harry Potter) to news organisations (including, it should be said, the Daily Mail) whose output can be stolen and re-packaged into AI news ‘stories’ or ‘summaries’ without any money being generated to support journalism.

To a layman, this may all seem highly technical. But Big Tech’s theft of copyright content really matters, because it comes with a cost to all of us: Britain’s creative sector contributes around £126billion a year to GDP, and it employs 2.5million people.

Protecting it from illegal exploitation should therefore, one might argue, be one of the Government’s key responsibilities.

Paul McCartney said new copyright rules will create a ‘wild west’ where new musicians will be unable to make a living because AI platforms will ‘just rip it off’

Kyle’s department apparently sees things differently. It has decided to rewrite the copyright rules in order to give Big Tech, including some of the wealthiest companies in world history, the right to ‘scrape’ all copyright content – from music and books to film, journalism, scientific research and fashion designs – without having to pay.

The only exception will be if a creator or copyright owner takes steps to protect all of their content. Given the sheer size of the internet, plus the fact it can be impossible to detect when an AI firm is accessing data, critics say this would be almost impossible.

Kyle’s new rules, which give every appearance of being written in Silicon Valley, rather than in Whitehall, have duly sparked a major political row.

The British Phonographic Industry, the music trade association, says the rules will ‘devalue’ British artists. And Sir Elton John has pointed out that they will ‘allow global Big Tech companies to gain free and easy access to artists’ work to train their AI and create competing music’.

Meanwhile, Sir Paul McCartney said they will create a ‘wild west’ where new musicians will be unable to make a living because AI platforms will ‘just rip it off’.

Dozens of prominent figures criticised those platforms in yesterday’s Mail. Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer and filmmaker who directed Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, said they will lead to a ‘wholesale shift’ of wealth from Britain’s creative industry to mostly US-based tech companies.

‘They are trying to justify this by claiming the law will lead to an AI boom which will boost the economy and help Government run better.

‘But you tell me which medical breakthrough is going to be helped by allowing corporates to steal an Ed Sheeran song? Or how public services will get more efficient because a tech firm can rip off a fashion designer’s work.’

Particularly upsetting to the industries threatened by the new law is the fact that while Kyle has cleared his diaries on dozens of occasions to speak with these firms, he’s yet to manage a single meeting with anyone from the creative sector who will be threatened by the proposal. Not one!

One insider says: ‘There was a meeting with stakeholders arranged for October 8, but three weeks before that date his office decided to cancel due to what they called “urgent matters”.’

‘Several meetings with the creative industry have been pencilled in and then ruled out. It looks like he’s only willing to sit down with people on one side of this debate, which I am afraid tells its own story.’

Also causing a political stink is the fact the Government has failed to conduct a proper cost-benefit analysis to see whether its proposed law change would actually provide any financial benefit to Britain.

Some argue it will actually end up costing the taxpayer a fortune since the majority of tech firms are based overseas, where most of the jobs they create, and cash they generate, eventually ends up.

Mark Zuckerberg’s firm Meta was one of several to meet with Peter Kyle after Labour’s general election victory

An AI ‘action plan’ published by Kyle’s department doesn’t exactly reassure. It claims AI could boost the economy by £400billion by 2030. Footnotes reveal this figure comes not from independent research but is instead sourced from a report by tech lobbying firm Public First, which is employed by a range of AI companies, including Google.

‘They haven’t stopped to think about whether AI companies will actually invest here [we have the highest electricity costs in the Western world and AI consumes vast quantities of energy], or if they do whether it will actually create any jobs, which it may very well not,’ says one senior industry figure.

Another adds: ‘Britain’s creative industry is the second largest in the world. We are risking all that because Peter Kyle has drunk the Kool-Aid of Silicon Valley lobbyists and has stars in his eyes.’

In fairness to Kyle, friends argue it would be hard for a technology minister to do his job properly without sometimes meeting with leading tech firms. And while he hasn’t offered similar access to anyone from the creative industries, junior ministers – such as Chris Bryant and Feryal Clark –have granted some audiences.

Sources close to the minister also say that no final decision will be made on exactly how copyright law will be tweaked, or whether it will be changed at all, until the consultation process ends later this month.

However things end up, you only have to dig around a bit to realise those lobbyists got their teeth into the minister long before he entered Government. He was appointed to the shadow Technology brief in September 2023, and was immediately deluged by donations from firms with financial interests in AI.

Between January and July last year, for example, tech expert Emily Middleton was seconded to his office by tech consultancy Public Digital – a donation registered as being worth £66,000.

Public Digital has many clients in the AI industry, and its founder Mike Bracken has recently been advising French President Emmanuel Macron on the subject.

In a highly controversial move, Ms Middleton was appointed director general in Kyle’s department following the General Election, on a taxpayer-funded salary of upwards of £128,000 a year.

Another high-profile AI firm, Faculty AI, supplied an employee to work in Kyle’s office providing ‘technical expertise’ for one day per week between May and June, a donation worth £36,000.

The firm, which was supposed to have a policy preventing it from making party-political donations, sent a memo to staff about the appointment that was later leaked to The Guardian.

‘Labour requested a Faculty secondee to help them shape their AI policy as part of their programme for Government,’ it read. ‘This is to help them if they are elected, not to help them get elected.’ In other words, the £36,000 was, the firm believed, money well spent.

Also digging into his pockets to help the future minister was Anthony Watson, a prominent businessman and former Nike executive who gave Kyle’s campaign £6,000.

He is the founder of the Bank of London, a somewhat troubled institution which counted Peter Mandelson as a director (and recently came close to being struck off over debts to HMRC).

Watson’s interests in AI have recently included the launch of a ‘code assistant that uses GenAI to help clients and developers build services, applications and products on the bank’s Application Programming Interface’.

In February last year, Kyle meanwhile went on a £14,000 trip to Silicon Valley paid for, in part, by Hakluyt, a lobbying and investment firm with stakes in an array of AI startups including CalypsoAI, viz.ai, Interos and Tenstorrent.

The jet-setting has continued in Government, almost always involving events that allow Kyle to air his obsession with AI.

Last weekend he was at the Munich Security Conference: ‘I’ve been meeting with tech companies and people from other governments to make sure we’re working together to harness the best of this technology.’

On Monday, it was off Saudi Arabia ‘to discuss how our two countries can collaborate on future telecoms, AI and genomics’.

By Tuesday he was in Qatar touring the Qatar Computing Research Institute, learning about the petro-state’s ‘revised national action plan on AI’.

Next month, Labour’s tech minister plans to return to Silicon Valley, where he will speak at a concert in San Jose, California, hosted by his old friends at AI chipmaker Nvidia. In the official programme, the tech giant describes Kyle as an ‘industry visionary’.

Like many of the rapacious tech industry’s biggest AI firms, they presumably now regard the minister as one of their own.