ICO outlines why trust and transparency are central to its AI strategy

A blog article on LinkedIn by William Malcolm, Executive Director of Regulatory Risk and Innovation at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), sets out how the regulator plans to build trust, transparency, and accountability directly into how artificial intelligence (AI) tools are built and deployed. Malcolm writes that the time to get AI Governance right is now. He points out that society is facing a classic regulatory dilemma: step in too early and you risk stifling technological progress; wait too late, and harmful product habits and social norms become practically impossible to undo.

Drawing parallels to past missteps in social media and advertising technology, where rushing products to market led to long-term public scepticism, Malcolm notes that confidence is already slipping. Today, only 33& of people trust companies using AI to protect their personal data, a figure that continues to decline year on year. Furthermore, he stresses that data protection law applies across the entire AI lifecycle, from training massive foundation models to deploying consumer applications and handling fully automated decisions that carry significant consequences for people's lives.

To tackle these challenges across the UK economy, the ICO is launching several practical initiatives as part of its new draft corporate strategy. The regulator is preparing a statutory code of practice covering AI and automated decision-making (ADM) to give businesses clear ground rules, while drafting targeted data protection advice for emerging agentic systems and working internationally to keep global standards aligned. The ICO is also listening to growing public unease over ever-increasing personalisation, working directly with big tech firms to ensure transparency and privacy-focused development, and creating straightforward guidance to inform users while supporting smaller organisations to approach data protection due diligence when procuring AI tools and services with confidence. 

Alongside tackling fresh cybersecurity threats and streamlining its Innovation and Sandbox services for developers, the ICO argues that strong, transparent boundaries will not slow innovation down, but can instead provide the public trust needed for AI to thrive.

In a related article, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei discusses the need for "equally balanced" discussions on the "risks and benefits" of AI technologies. The article is a response to criticism that Amodei should "make an effort to be a more positive advocate" for the industry.

Meanwhile, an article in The Wall Street Journal (£) reports on OpenAI's new model safety and security policy, which includes a no-data-retention promise. A move clearly designed to increase trust so that it may win customers from Anthropic. 

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