The New Dark Age

Thursday, 22 May 2025 — Foxglove

Foxglove does a lot of work in the UK. We’re concerned about the direction of government tech policy. Keir Starmer’s team seem to be getting far too cosy with Big Tech companies, and aren’t taking enough care to ensure new technology works, is safe, and is in the public interest.

This week we’ve written about a couple of worrying recent developments…

The UK Home Office is boasting about a new “Chat-GPT-style software” trialled for use in asylum decisions – despite evidence that it’s dangerously flawed.

Ministers heralded the results of the trial as a success, claiming it could save the equivalent of 44 years of caseworker time. But when Foxglove looked behind the hype and into the details of the trials, we found evidence of alarming flaws in the system.

One in ten summaries produced by the tool were found to be so inaccurate they had to be removed from the pilot entirely. This is extremely serious – decisions about asylum claims can be life or death. It’s worrying that the government is talking up a tool which, according to their own evaluation, has such significant problems in such a high proportion of cases.

If you’ve been a Foxglove supporter for some time, you’ll know this isn’t the first time we’ve sounded the alarm over the Home Office’s enthusiasm for dodgy decision-making software. Back in 2020, we brought a legal challenge against an algorithm which discriminated against people based on their nationality – or as it was known at the time: “speedy boarding for white people”. We forced then-Home Secretary Priti Patel to back down and withdraw it.

The Home Office has a lot of questions to answer, and mustn’t be allowed to push ahead with this flawed tool. Read more on our website, here: https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2025/05/19/home-office-chatgpt-llm-life-or-death-people-seeking-asylum/

The UK government has instructed the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to support the “AI Opportunities Action Plan” – which could risk watering down the rules for tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google.

The CMA is the British regulator tasked with standing up to tech giants when they get too big and abuse their size and power. But recent moves by the government seem designed to benefit Silicon Valley monopolies instead of promoting fair competition in the UK.

You may remember that a few months ago the government pushed out the CMA’s chair, and replaced him with the former chief of Amazon UK. Meanwhile Microsoft’s UK CEO is chairing the Government’s Industrial Strategy Council.

All this forms part of a worrying trend of the government being far too close to Big Tech companies. As a result, we think ministers have become far too willing to believe the claim that what’s good for Silicon Valley billionaires is good for Britain.

Big Tech is using this influence to demand less rules to follow, and more access to taxpayer cash for government contracts.

Read more about this, and why it’s a threat to our our public services, our small businesses and our democracy, on our website, here: https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2025/05/22/government-wallet-inspected-big-tech/

Foxglove fights both to stop Big Tech corporations abusing their power – and to stop governments using tech in a harmful way. We’ll keep working for a future where these abuses are stopped and where the benefits of tech are shared fairly.

We couldn’t do any of this without our supporters – so thank you for being involved. We’ll send more updates soon.

Thanks for all your support,

Martha Dark

Co-Executive Director, Foxglove