UK Extends Online Safety Act to AI Chatbots

Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans on Monday to extend the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act to cover AI chatbots, ensuring providers face the same child protection duties as social media platforms. The move, outlined in a speech in London, addresses a recent scandal involving Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, which generated non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors, and forms part of broader efforts to safeguard children online.

The announcement follows an investigation by the media regulator Ofcom into Grok, developed by Musk's xAI and integrated into the social media platform X. Regulators contacted X and xAI after the chatbot produced explicit content in response to public prompts, leading to the removal of the image-generation function. Starmer emphasized the government's response, stating, "The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass. Today we are closing loopholes that put children at risk."

Under the proposed amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, AI chatbot operators, including those behind tools like Grok, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT, would be required to prevent illegal or harmful content. Ofcom could...