AI Accountability, Liability and the Standards Question

The risks posed by physical and agentic AI are no longer hypothetical. Autonomous vehicles are being piloted on public roads in England, AI-assisted robots are used in surgical procedures in NHS Trusts and agentic AI systems are executing consequential tasks across financial services and legal workflows.

Yet, whilst adoption accelerates, serious questions remain as to whether our legal frameworks are adequately equipped to address liability, accountability, and provide redress when things go wrong - how responsibility should be fairly assigned across developers, deployers, and operators. Questions that are accentuated in areas such as agentic AI and physical AI but relevant across all AI applications. UKAI's members have first hand experience on a day to day basis of grappling with such questions and of their business impact.

The important role the UK can play in finding answers to these key questions was picked up by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall, who in her Bloomberg speech on 28th January 2026 made the point that the UK is uniquely placed to set the standards for how AI is used and adopted.  In her subsequent RUSI speech on 28th April 2026,  she stressed the importance of the UK being “able to influence standards, security and innovation rather than being dependent on decisions taken elsewhere”.

This round table will look at the key pre-requisites to realising this ambition and to give it impetus in the context of AI. It will seek to bridge policy and practice to (1) highlight where businesses operating at the coal face find that legal clarity is most urgently required and (2) using that to ground a discussion as to where horizontal and vertical laws and standards can be most impactful.

Please note: This is a strictly invite-only event. While expressions of interest may be submitted, all registrations are subject to review, and attendance will be confirmed at UKAI’s discretion to ensure a balanced and high-value discussion among participants.