Sunday, January 18, 2026
A lobbying imbalance
The paper says that its investigation has found that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexualised images of women and children, were among the US tech companies holding hundreds of meetings with people at the heart of government:
Google, the $4tn California company, had the greatest access, with more than 100 ministerial meetings, according to an analysis of meeting records for the two years to October 2025, which campaigners said showed the tech industry’s “capture” of government. The industry lobbying group Tech UK met ministers at the rate of more than once every eight working days.
X attended 13 meetings, a small proportion of the overall number, but still more than the child safety campaign group the NSPCC or the Molly Rose Foundation, founded by the family of 14-year-old Molly Russell who killed herself after viewing harmful online content.
“The frequency of meetings between government and big tech and their advocates is astounding and points to the incredible power imbalance at stake when it comes to protecting children online,” said Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation.
The government defended its position, saying “regular engagement with technology companies is vital to delivering economic growth and transforming public services”. Campaigners said the government should stop “bending the knee to US big tech companies” and that the figures revealed an “incredible power imbalance” when it came to protecting children online.
There has been growing controversy over X’s Grok AI tool, and a resurgence in the campaign for the government to follow Australia and ban social media for under-16s, which is opposed by tech companies. In the UK, 84% of people are concerned ministers will prioritise tech company partnerships over the public interest when it comes to AI regulation.
Dame Chi Onwurah, the Labour chair of the science and technology select committee, said the findings underscored “the reality that these firms have turnovers larger than the GDP of many countries, and their ability to influence stands in stark contrast to that of their users, our constituents, or those campaigning to make the internet safer”.
She said it was “crucial for big tech to be accountable to parliament – something that the disturbing recent news about ‘nudification’ tools has only underlined further”.
The technology companies and their lobbyists attended at least 639 meetings with ministers compared with just 75 meetings attended by the organisations and campaigners fighting for greater protections for children online, such as the NSPCC.
The tech firms’ access was also more than three times greater than that of organisations and campaigners seeking to protect creatives’ copyrighted works from being mined to build AI models, a development that figures including Elton John and Kazuo Ishiguro have said risks giving away artists’ “lifeblood”.
Ed Newton-Rex, a campaigner for creators’ rights, called the figures “shocking” and said they explained why ministers had launched their consultation on AI and copyright “with a ‘preferred option’ that read like a wishlist from big tech”.
“It is imperative that the government stop bending the knee to US big tech companies – which, as the recent Grok debacle has shown, don’t have the interests of the British people at heart,” he said.
As important as technology is, these figures are shocking. Government should be putting the safety of women and children ahead of the big tech companies and that should be reflected in the activities of ministers and their actions.
