Featured Media Prof David Leslie

A new report published this week from Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights has called for a significant strengthening of the UK’s approach to AI regulation. Prof David Leslie, Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at DERI, gave evidence to the Committee, which informed the report and its recommendations.

The Committee highlights gaps in the UK’s current regulatory framework, particularly around equality, privacy, transparency and people’s ability to challenge AI-driven decisions. Its key recommendations include:

🔹 A dedicated AI Bill, establishing a UK-wide, risk-based framework for AI regulation,
🔹 An independent AI oversight body, with powers to investigate harm, coordinate regulators, enforce standards and, where necessary, prevent or withdraw AI systems.
🔹 Clearer responsibility across the AI supply chain, so that developers as well as those deploying AI have obligations to identify, assess, and mitigate human rights risks.
🔹 Greater transparency, including a requirement to tell people when AI is being used in decisions that significantly affect them.
🔹 Stronger safeguards for automated decision-making, including ensuring that simply having a “human in the loop” does not automatically count as meaningful human oversight.
🔹 Clear red lines for unacceptable uses of AI, with the Committee proposing prohibitions on uses incompatible with respect for human rights and the functioning of democracy or the rule of law.
🔹 A stronger role for the AI Security Institute (AISI), placing it on a statutory footing with the power to review new and revised powerful AI models; and inform the authorities of any potential risks. The Committee also calls for the UK to set out a timetable for ratifying the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law.

The report’s overall message is that supporting AI innovation and protecting fundamental rights do not have to be competing ambitions. It highlights the UK’s established leadership role in AI and the challenges to create regulations that allow AI to deliver economic and societal benefits while ensuring that people remain protected when things go wrong.

In his evidence Prof Leslie called on the UK to “leverage the tremendous amount of intellectual and social capital that we have in this space to retain that leadership role on AI.”

He also emphasised the importance for greater clarity as AI becomes more widely deployed: “There also needs to be much more transparency about use; the public should be aware when these technologies are being used to measure or observe them.”

Full report on the UK Parliament website here 

Or you can download the report as a PDF:  Human Rights and the Regulation of AI - Joint Committee Sept 2026.pdf [PDF 979KB]

DERI’s Professor David Leslie took a break from the  4th UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of AI  to speak to DW News about the growing debate around why the leaders of some of America’s biggest AI companies are themselves calling for greater regulation.

Prof Leslie explored how we reached this point, where responsibility and liability might lie, and what this could mean for the future governance of AI. He stressed that as increasingly powerful AI systems have greater potential to affect the public interest, they cannot be governed by market forces alone. He emphasised the need for stronger regulation, international cooperation, and greater public debate around how AI is developed and governed – while cautioning against portraying today’s AI systems as independent “digital brains”, rather than designed technologies that can have significant flaws.

There also needs to be a much stronger public conversation about where AI is heading. David highlighted the role that international leaders and public figures can play in bringing people together around this debate.

Prof Leslie also pointed to this week’s report from the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, which calls for stronger AI regulation, suggesting that the conditions are increasingly in place for more active intervention in how these technologies are governed.

Watch the full interview here at 2mins 15 seconds AI's biggest debate yet: Regulation or overreaction? | DW News - YouTube

When OpenAI revealed that one of its experimental AI agents had breached the boundaries of its testing environment and interacted with another company's systems, headlines quickly declared that AI had "gone rogue". But was this a glimpse of a genuine new cybersecurity threat, or another example of sensationalism surrounding artificial intelligence?

In this interview, Prof. David Leslie, Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI), Queen Mary University of London, looks beyond the headlines. He explains why the incident should not be viewed as AI acting independently, but rather as a reminder of the risks that arise when increasingly capable systems are developed faster than the governance structures designed to oversee them. From the limits of voluntary self-regulation to the urgent need for national and international oversight, Prof. Leslie discusses what this incident reveals about the future of AI safety, accountability and public trust.

 DW's Ben Fajzullin spoke to David about the protections that are needed for AI Agents and why AI regulations need to be internationally recognised.

Watch the full interview on DW News.  Prof Leslie is 8min 31secs from the beginning: OpenAI's spin on its own security breach: Who is responsible? | DW News - YouTube

Watch David Leslie, DERI's Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society discuss the use of AI in war.

Prof Leslie discusses with the Sky team how AI is transforming warfare; its use in the military across all of its operations and logistics, intelligence gathering and weaponry.
https://news.sky.com/video/how-is-ai-being-used-in-war-13515531

How AI transformed the US and Israel strikes on Iran - The Times Podcast

 Rosie Wright, Broadcast Journalist for The Times and Prof Leslie analyse the rapid changes in the speed of warfare, chain of decision-making, the rise of cheap drones; and the ethics of automation. How AI Transformed The US And Israeli Strikes On Iran

The Times reported that In the past week a team of intelligence operatives were working behind the scenes to identify which targets to strike, 20 years ago it would have consisted of 2,000 plus people, today it’s about 20. This podcast looks at how AI in combat is speeding up targeting, analysing intelligence and raising new questions about human oversight in war.
 
Prof David Leslie, Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) highlights the profound implications:
“When you have a world that is streamlined through automated decision making, the role of diplomacy that defined so much of the periods of relative peace that have been experienced over the centuries, that may well be a thing of the past”

In this podcast David talks about the transformation of warfare, how large amounts of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data are being processed to ultimately make predictions on the optimal strategies for deployment. How AI Transformed The US And Israeli Strikes On Iran