Starry-eyed Minister Who’s Been Captured By The Big Tech Bros: In Just Three Months, Peter Kyle Had Up To 30 Meetings With Ai Firms – And None With Britain’s Vital Creative Sector

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.

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.

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