Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (Public Networks) Bill
Draft · 11 October 2026
A Bill toprohibit autonomous artificial intelligence from taking external actions on public networks without human authorisation, while leaving research, development, private use, human-initiated use and AI-assisted design of fixed software lawful; and for connected purposes.
BE IT ENACTED by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
Part 1: Preliminary
1Interpretation
In this Act:
- “autonomous AI system” (AAI) means a covered AI system that chooses for itself what to do next without human approval;
- “autonomous external action” (AEA) means an external action that no natural person has authorised under section 5;
- “covered AI system” means a machine-learning model, including any large language model, whose outputs or choices of action are not fully fixed in advance by human-written rules;
- “external action” means any act by or through a covered AI system that causes data or effects to pass beyond the computer or private network on which it runs; an act crosses that boundary if, at any point in its path, even in transit, it leaves that network or crosses the public internet; delivering the reply to the person who asked is not an external action;
- “fixed program” means software that contains no covered AI system, is fully determined by its code, and is released by a named person;
- “human confirmation” means a specific, informed, real-time human decision about a named next external action, and blanket or advance approval does not count;
- “human-initiated AI service” (HIAIS) means a service in which a person sends a request to a covered AI system and receives its reply, and in which every external action is authorised by a human request or human confirmation, and none of them is a payment, transfer, purchase or trade (section 3);
- “human request” means a request made in real time by a natural person for the action concerned, and a request made by a scheduler, timer, trigger, program or other AI system is not a human request;
- “private network” means a network that is not open to the public, whose physical layer (layer 1 of the ISO Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model: the cables, fibres and radio links, and the equipment at their ends) is under the exclusive control of one person, or of persons under common control, and which connects to anything outside it only through equipment that person or those persons control; a virtual network, tunnel or overlay is private only if every physical link it runs over is;
- “public network” means the internet and any other network that is not a private network;
- “the Secretary of State” means one of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State.
Part 2: Prohibitions
2Autonomous operation
A person must not deploy or operate an autonomous AI system so that it takes an autonomous external action (AEA).
A person must not knowingly host, fund or otherwise enable the operation of an autonomous AI system that takes an autonomous external action (AEA).
3No financial capacity
An autonomous AI system may not hold or control any bank account, wallet, card, credit or other financial asset.
It may not initiate or carry out any payment, transfer, purchase or trade. Only a person decides.
No one may give it credentials, keys or cards for these.
Banks and payment providers must refuse accounts controlled by an autonomous AI system and report them.
Fixed programs may still process transactions under fixed rules.
Part 3: Lawful activity and its limits
4Lawful activity
Nothing in this Act prohibits:
running a covered AI system on a person’s own computer or private network, provided it takes no external action;
using AI to design, write, test and review software, which, released as a fixed program, is lawful on a public network;
researching, developing, training and testing AI, provided it takes no external action; or
providing or using human-initiated AI services.
5One deterministic external action per human request
A person must not allow an external action by or through a covered AI system unless a natural person initiated it by a human request, or confirmed it in real time beforehand.
Each human request authorises at most one external action, however closely a further action is related to it.
The action must be fully specified by the request. The AI may have a view on how to carry it out, but not whether, which or when to act.
Reading, comparing and summarising what the one action returned is not a further action. A search plus a comparison of the top three results it returned is one action.
Retrieval is a further action: fetching any of those results needs confirmation.
Part 4: General
6Short title, commencement and extent
This Act extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
This Act comes into force on such day as the Secretary of State may by regulations appoint.
The day appointed must be no later than 12 months after the day on which this Act receives Royal Assent.
Regulations under this section are to be made by statutory instrument.
This Act may be cited as the Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (Public Networks) Act 2026.
Explanatory Notes
These notes relate to the Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (Public Networks) Bill as introduced. They do not form part of the Bill and have not been endorsed by Parliament.
Policy background
- Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool when natural persons direct it and can read, judge and ignore what it produces.
- The Bill draws a deliberate boundary. AI may do everything within software, but may not independently conduct live operations on public networks. Its object is not to restrict what AI can think, design, write, simulate or develop, but to keep real-world execution under human control.
- An autonomous AI system chooses for itself what to do next without human approval. It acts with no person in the loop, at machine speed, and can replicate or relocate faster than any investigation can follow.
- The issue is autonomous AI systems operating on, over, or through public networks (AAIPN). The problem to be solved is not people acting in bad faith, but the autonomy of AI systems on public networks.
- Autonomous AI on public networks is like driverless vehicles on public roads or autonomous drones in the sky, but that on private land, such as a farm or a sealed private road, or inside the physically restricted airspace of a hangar, it is not,
- Human-initiated AI services (HIAIS), in which a person sends a request to an AI model and receives its reply, such as conversational AI assistants, are not AAIPN and are not prohibited, because they act only when prompted by a human and take no autonomous external action, only what that human has requested, such as a single internet search. Their output is only data (text, images, code), whatever its origin.
Purpose
The purpose of the Act is to keep every action taken by an AI system on a public network tied to a human decision, while leaving private use, human-initiated use and AI-assisted design of fixed software, including research and development of AI, lawful.
Territorial extent, commencement and what is not covered
The Act extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (section 6(1)), and comes into force on a day appointed by the Secretary of State by regulations, within 12 months of Royal Assent (section 6(2) and (3)). [Devolution and legislative consent to be considered.] This short form contains no offences, enforcement or institutional provisions. These remain to be drafted.