UK Minister accused of being too close to big tech after rise in meetings

I'm struggling to understand what the criticism is here, minster for technology meets with tech companies too much?

Information published by the government shows that from July 2024 until December 2024 – the most recent period for which there is data – Kyle held meetings with people representing or advocating for technology companies 28 times.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft were present at five of those meetings, the data shows, while Meta attended four.

So the big tech companies were present at ~1 in 6 of the meetings with tech companies.

In August Kyle met all four of those companies, and others from the industry, to discuss AI regulation.

This year he has met AI companies several times, according to documents obtained under freedom of information rules by the website tech.eu. Those meetings include three with the US AI company Anthropic, as well as a two-day flurry of meetings in February during which he saw executives from OpenAI, the chip designer Arm, Google DeepMind, ElevenLabs and Synthesia.

Maybe I'm being naive somehow but that all reads as minister for X meets influential people in X to discuss X.

3 comments

I'm struggling to understand what the criticism is here, minster for technology meets with tech companies too much?
Information published by the government shows that from July 2024 until December 2024 – the most recent period for which there is data – Kyle held meetings with people representing or advocating for technology companies 28 times.
Google, Amazon and Microsoft were present at five of those meetings, the data shows, while Meta attended four.
So the big tech companies were present at ~1 in 6 of the meetings with tech companies.
In August Kyle met all four of those companies, and others from the industry, to discuss AI regulation.
This year he has met AI companies several times, according to documents obtained under freedom of information rules by the website tech.eu. Those meetings include three with the US AI company Anthropic, as well as a two-day flurry of meetings in February during which he saw executives from OpenAI, the chip designer Arm, Google DeepMind, ElevenLabs and Synthesia.
Maybe I'm being naive somehow but that all reads as minister for X meets influential people in X to discuss X.
- This was my query: Are these meetings butter-up luncheons?
  Or simply a minister attending meetings that are part of their job.
I don't like the idea of MPs having private meetings with corpos at all. Unless it's discussion of something that would be a national security issue, I don't see why any meetings shouldn't all be on public record