Northern Ireland Office: Artificial Intelligence
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, whether his Department permits (a) Ministers, (b) special advisers and (c) officials to use (i) Chat GPT, (ii) Google Gemini, (iii) Claude, (iv) Deepseek and (v) Grok as part of their official duties.
Answered by Hilary Benn
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 Northern Ireland Office (NIO) provides officials, Ministers and special advisers with access to a secure, enterprise-grade generative AI tool that has been assured to the appropriate security standards and approved for official use. Ministers, special advisers and officials may only use generative AI tools that the NIO has approved for official use. The use of publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools for official business is not permitted by the NIO.
Approved enterprise tools are configured so that departmental data is held securely and is not used to train publicly available AI models. The use of generative AI across government is governed by the AI Playbook for the UK Government, which set out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.
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