Generative AI Regulation in the UK
Christopher T. Marsden · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Abstract The regulation of technology has three states that have legal meaning: self-regulation or ‘unregulation’ by industry (whether by individual companies or a collective association); principled co-regulation in which legislative or other legal duties are imposed on industry by government; regulation by government or more frequently a somewhat independent regulator which directly oversees the industry or the function in which a public good resides. In the UK, government has encouraged self-regulation when technologies emerge, co-regulation if there is a clear need for public oversight, and state regulation in specific sectors often imposed by European legal requirement. With Generative AI emerging in the last several years since ‘Brexit’, the UK has had to reassess that approach with Generative AI as a test case. Its approach has been to ‘first, do no harm’ except in the case of disinformation and deepfakes generated by AI. UK government ‘unregulation’ of AI has been aptly termed ‘regulatory hallucination’.