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Department for Business and Trade: Artificial Intelligence

Asked by Sir John HayesConservativeDepartment for Business and TradeTabled Answered 9 June 2026UIN 5299

The question

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, whether his department permits (1) Ministers, (2) Special advisers and (3) officials to use (a) Chat GPT, (b) Google Gemini, (c) Claude, (d) Deepseek and (e) Grok as part of their official duties.

Answered by Kate Dearden

The Government is committed to harnessing the benefits of artificial intelligence to improve the productivity of the Civil Service and the quality of public services.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) provides officials, Ministers and special advisers with access to secure, enterprise-grade generative AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot and DBT Assist that have been assured to the appropriate security standards and approved for official use.

The use of other artificial intelligence tools, including publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools mentioned in the Question is not routinely permitted at DBT. Any proposal to use such tools must first be assessed and approved through the Department’s governance processes in line with the cross-government Generative AI Framework for HMG and the AI Playbook for the UK Government to ensure safe, secure, responsible, and effective use of these tools.

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