Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says overseas artificial-intelligence labs are already using Australian books, music and journalism to train models without payment or permission, and that Canberra must rewrite copyright settings before investment flows to local data centres on the wrong terms.
Inquiry letter puts copyright on the table
The bipartisan parliamentary inquiry into AI sent Albanese an open letter on Tuesday, ahead of its formal report due by 30 November. The committee urged the government to examine whether current copyright law is facilitating licensing deals for Australian culture and content, and to prioritise rules that let creators retain control, get paid, and see systems reflect local values.
The letter also recommended independent safety checks on frontier models, reserved compute for Australian use, and early access for security agencies—proposals shaped in part by the high-profile breach at technology services provider Synapxe that exposed health-sector data.
Albanese frames the fight as sovereignty
Speaking after the letter’s release, Albanese said changes were about “taking control” rather than handing global platforms a free pass to scrape the national catalogue. Developers want clearer pathways to train inside Australia, but arts groups argue a broad text-and-data-mining exception would let multinationals mine local work without contracts.
The Australian Recording Industry Association told AAP that existing copyright law already gives creators control and warned against weakening it to appease American AI companies. Technology advocates counter that without workable licensing markets, training jobs will stay offshore in jurisdictions with more permissive regimes.
Pocock questions ‘pre-vetting’ of advice
Independent senator David Pocock criticised markups on the letter that, he said, showed recommendations were reviewed in the prime minister’s office without time for committee members to adjust them. Deputy chair Jonno Duniam, a Liberal, defended coalition and government input as normal for a joint committee product.
The committee also pressed for more sovereign compute, recommending that a share of capacity in new data centres be reserved for Australian researchers and startups rather than exported workloads alone. That pitch aligns with Albanese’s wider industry policy, but telcos warn that export revenue helps justify the power and water investments new AI campuses require.
For studios, publishers and newsrooms, the political fight is immediate: any reform that allows training on in-copyright material without opt-in deals could undercut existing licensing talks with labs. Screen producers told the inquiry that opt-out regimes in other countries had left creators chasing takedown notices instead of upfront payments.
For Albanese, the bet is that voters will back a sovereignty pitch—even if it slows some data-centre announcements—rather than watch another sector’s output become training fuel by default while overseas labs commercialise the results.