Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor are moving closer to a deal that would pave the way for the largest artificial intelligence firms to set up in Australia as Anthropic reasserts its warning that Australia’s copyright laws are blocking investment.
Albanese and Taylor met in Parliament House on Monday, according to sources in both parties as the Greens and independent senator David Pocock raised concern about a Labor-Coalition deal that would not properly compensate creatives for content used to train AI models such as Claude.
The leaders of the traditional parties of government have been meeting more often than Albanese did with former Liberal leader Sussan Ley to thrash out big-ticket policy issues. Albanese lamented on Tuesday that Australian politicians were appealing “to the fringes”.
Sources in both parties said the leaders were eager to come together on a solution that would compensate creative rights-holders without forcing OpenAI and Anthropic to sign individual licence agreements, creating an unwanted global precedent for the firms and leading to international rights holders suing AI firms under Australian law.
Labor has not yet put a clear solution to the Coalition, so there is no final agreement, and there may be a dispute when the government lands on a position.
This masthead reported in August that Coalition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam had extended an olive branch to Labor on AI regulation in a bid to tamp down public anxiety.
The meetings come as One Nation continues to out-poll the Coalition on first preferences and is just 4 percentage points shy of Labor, according to the latest Resolve Political Monitor.
Pocock seized on an embarrassing revelation on Tuesday about the prime minister’s office’s involvement in a bipartisan committee inquiry on AI. The committee’s chairs, Duniam and Labor MP Jo Briskey, wrote to Albanese this week calling for the government to invest in data centres and requesting independent assessors to monitor the firms.
Pocock said that when he received the letter, it contained edits from a member of the prime minister’s staff, calling into question the independence of the inquiry and underlining Labor’s centralised governing model.
“This is meant to be a letter from the committee, but clearly has been heavily vetted by the prime minister’s office,” Pocock told News24.
“I’m concerned that the major parties are working together to potentially get a preconceived outcome rather than actually listening to experts, listening to the community.”
Pocock said the letter skirted over the anxiety of creatives and the need to consider a levy on data centres to provide tangible benefit to the community.
Duniam suggested Pocock was misguided.
“I told David Pocock last week I was writing the letter. It was, of course, replete with typographical and grammatical errors. So I’m pleased others picked it up,” he told News24. “I think it is important for the PM to be interested in this body of work … I’m pleased we’ve had this interaction between government, opposition and crossbench.”
The nation’s copyright laws would open up AI firms to litigation in Australia, so the firms are currently building data centres solely for what’s known as “inference” – answering questions on models such as Claude. The companies are hoping to make more valuable investments in data centres used to train their models, which would require engineers and a genuine presence in Australia.
The tech firms are much less interested in getting access to Australian content than they are in not getting sued. Tech company leaders have offered to pay into a broader pool of money as a compromise to get around individual licensing.
Albanese on Tuesday did not rule out changing copyright rules, but stressed he would ultimately protect the interests of the creative sector.
“This is a complex issue. We need to get on top of it,” Albanese told ABC TV.
Anthropic’s international special envoy Jeff Bleich told the Australian Financial Review’s energy summit that it had not proposed a specific model for Australian copyright.
“We’re committed to coming to Australia regardless, but we can only do inference at this stage, given legal uncertainty,” he said.
Assistant Minister for the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton pointed to the moratorium on data centres in Texas as evidence that Australia needed to ensure tech giants maintained a social licence.
“Texas, home of the brave, land of the free, has introduced a moratorium on data centres,” Charlton told an Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry conference in Canberra. “You have to lose a lot of social licence to be banned in Texas. Data centres have done that. We do not want that to happen in Australia.”
Australian Recording Industry Association chief executive Annabelle Herd said Duniam and Briskey were wrong to say that Australia’s copyright laws weren’t working. “It ignores substantial evidence provided to the committee,” she said.
“Australian copyright law gives creators control. It is the only thing standing between major American AI companies and unchecked access to the world’s content right.”
In a sign of the fragile politics surrounding the data centre boom, far-left Greens leader David Shoebridge savaged the bipartisan committee, which he claimed was “captive” to a government “ducking for cover”.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.