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Our successful request for Peter Kyle\u2019s ChatGPT logs stunned observers<\/p>\n
Tada Images\/Victoria Jones\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When I fired off an email at the start of 2025, I hadn\u2019t intended to set a legal precedent for how the UK government handles its interactions with AI chatbots, but that is exactly what happened.<\/p>\n
It all began\u00a0in January<\/a> when I read an interview with the then-UK tech secretary Peter Kyle in Politics Home. Trying to suggest he used first-hand the technology his department was set up to regulate, Kyle said that he would often have conversations with ChatGPT.<\/p>\n That got me wondering: could I obtain his chat history? Freedom of information (FOI) laws are often deployed to obtain emails and other documents produced by public bodies, but past precedent has suggested that some private data \u2013 such as search queries \u2013 aren\u2019t eligible for release in this way. I was interested to see which way the chatbot conversations would be categorised.<\/p>\n It turned out to be the former: while many of Kyle\u2019s interactions with ChatGPT were considered to be private, and so ineligible to be released under FOI laws, the times when he interacted with the AI chatbot in an official capacity were.<\/p>\n So it was that in March, the Department for Science, Industry and Technology (DSIT) provided a handful of conversations that Kyle had had with the chatbot \u2013 which became the basis for our exclusive story<\/a> revealing his conversations.<\/p>\n The release of the chat interactions was a shock to data protection and FOI experts. \u201cI\u2019m surprised that you got them,\u201d said Tim Turner, a data protection expert based in Manchester, UK, at the time. Others were less diplomatic in their language: they were stunned.<\/p>\n When publishing the story, we explained how the release was a world first \u2013 and getting access to AI chatbot conversations went on to gain international interest.<\/p>\n Researchers in different countries, including Canada and Australia, got in touch with me to ask for tips on how to craft their own requests to government ministers to try to obtain the same information. For example, a subsequent FOI request<\/a> in April found that Feryal Clark, then the UK minister for artificial intelligence, hadn\u2019t used ChatGPT at all in her official capacity, despite professing its benefits. But many requests proved unsuccessful, as governments began to rely more on legal exceptions to the free release of information.<\/p>\n I have personally found that the UK government has become much cagier around the idea of FOI, especially concerning AI use, since my story for New Scientist. A subsequent request I made via FOI legislation for the response within DSIT to the story \u2013 including any emails or Microsoft Teams messages mentioning the story, plus how DSIT arrived at its official response to the article \u2013 was rejected.<\/p>\n The reason why? It was deemed vexatious, and sorting out valid information that ought to be included from the rest would take too long. I was tempted to ask the government to use ChatGPT to summarise everything relevant, given how much the then-tech secretary had waxed lyrical about its prowess, but decided against it.<\/p>\n Overall, the release mattered because governments are adopting AI at pace. The UK government has already admitted that the civil service is using ChatGPT-like tools in day-to-day processes, claiming to save up to two weeks\u2019 a year<\/a> through improved efficiency. Yet AI doesn\u2019t impartially summarise information, nor is it perfect: hallucinations exist. That\u2019s why it is important to have transparency over how it is used \u2013 for good or ill.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n politics<\/a>\/2025 news review<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our successful request for Peter Kyle\u2019s ChatGPT logs stunned observers Tada Images\/Victoria Jones\/Shutterstock When I fired off an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[124508,554,733,4308,229,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-331466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-2025-news-review","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}