Earlier this week, the Prime Minister delivered a one-two punch on copyright and data centres: two of the most contentious national conversations on AI. Speaking at the University of Sydney, Anthony Albanese announced a set of national Australian standards for AI: a single framework covering copyright, data centres, energy, water, and the workforce, coordinated by a new Office of AI inside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with legislation to be brought to Parliament early next year.
Just over a year ago I wrote We Will Not Let OpenAI Write Our Education Policy, in response to OpenAI’s unsolicited “Economic Blueprint” for Australia and its glossy two-pager on how to fix our schools. My argument was pretty straightforward: policy about AI in this country should be written here, by people accountable to us, not by the companies selling the technology. This speech is the strongest signal yet that the government agrees.
You can watch the full speech below. There’s plenty to hold the government to account on, and it’s a long walk from this speech to the action required to pull it off, but as a statement of intent this is the most substantial thing an Australian Prime Minister has said about AI to date.
Others will write the rules
Albanese was clear on what happens if we don’t provide a united front, with states and territories working together to implement a national strategy:
“If we descend into self-doubt or wander out into the global market as a disparate collection of states and councils and companies and firms, rather than as one country, then others will write the rules and, maybe, they will play by them.”
Anthony Albanese, University of Sydney, 15 July 2026
“Others will write the rules” is precisely what has been happening. When OpenAI briefed Parliament on the “financial benefit” of partnership and published its ten-point action plan for our economy and our classrooms, that was an attempt to write the rules. The techlash of the past few years has been, at its heart, a reaction to exactly this: decisions about our lives being made in boardrooms we can’t see, let alone vote for.
The Prime Minister’s answer is leverage. AI exists in ‘the cloud’, but it isn’t ephemeral: it is land, energy, water and computing power, and Australia has what the industry needs:
“The expansion of AI requires a physical material footprint. It needs our land and energy and computing power to operate. That means we can set the terms, we can determine AI’s social licence, but we have to do it now. We cannot revisit this issue after companies have built whatever they want, wherever they want, and try to then reopen negotiations. This is our time to decide what AI looks like here in Australia.”
Anthony Albanese, University of Sydney, 15 July 2026
That’s the right analysis, and it’s also the honest one: the window for setting terms is while the data centres are still on the drawing board, not after.
“Anything less is theft”
Back in 2024 I wrote about the tech industry’s cavalier attitude towards copyright, arguing that we needed systemic change: training data transparency, disclosure requirements, and licensing models that actually involve the people whose work makes these systems possible. At the time it felt like shouting into the void. Artists, musicians, and writers are of course on board with these ideas, but the loudest voices have insisted it’s not possible to develop fair training methods for large scale AI.
Then the international lawsuits started piling up, the settlements got bigger, and as I covered in the article Artefacts of the AI Resistance, people around the world from individuals to multinational not-for-profits have started to push back.
When the Productivity Commission floated a text and data mining exception that would have let AI companies train on Australian work without permission, an idea the government rejected last October, that was another attempt to write rules which suit technology companies more than Australian creatives. This week, Albanese held the line:
“Not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all. Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day.”
And then, in case anyone missed it:
“No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. And that includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less is theft.”
A Prime Minister describing unlicensed AI training as theft, in a keynote designed to attract AI investment, is significant. Albanese was candid that “no country has got this right yet”, and he’s right there: the UK’s opt-out proposal has been fought to a standstill by its creative industries, and the US is still churning through dozens of contradictory lawsuits (while the predominantly US-based “frontier” AI companies carry on with business as usual).
Of course, the challenge now will be to get national consensus and put legislation around the promises, to make sure that the stance on copyright is more than “just hot air”.
Net generators, not net users
When I updated the Teaching AI Ethics: Environment article last year, the two consistent problems were transparency (nobody will tell us what these systems actually consume) and cost-shifting (communities absorbing the energy and water burden of infrastructure they never asked for). The new standards take direct aim at the second problem:
“We will create a legal obligation for the next generation of large-scale data centres to underwrite new power supply, to pay their full share of grid connection so no costs are passed on to homes or businesses, and to put at least as much energy into our grid as they take out of it, to be net generators, not net users.”
Anthony Albanese, University of Sydney, 15 July 2026
And on water:
“Australia is the sunniest continent on earth, but we are also the driest, which is why our rules will require data centres to minimise their water use, to maximise their energy efficiency and pay for any additional water infrastructure that is required.”
Data centres as net renewable energy generators is a world-first requirement at a national level. If it survives contact with the industry’s lobbyists, it answers one of the most persistent and legitimate criticisms of this technology.
Like the copyright concerns, that’s a big “if”, and given the contention surrounding data centres it’s one of the most important conversations worth watching between now and the legislation landing.
The real issues were never technical
If you’ve followed the Teaching AI Ethics project since 2023, one passage of the speech will sound very familiar:
“You do not need to be an expert in AI to have a say or a stake in it. We’re all involved. Because the real issues that AI presents are not technical ones. They are economic ones, legal ones, social ones.”
That has been the through line of the whole series, from the original nine articles to the updated collection and the resources now at teachingaiethics.com: copyright, environment, power, human labour, privacy, truth. These were never fringe concerns to be waved away as anti-innovation hand-wringing. They are the substance of the policy conversation, and this week they were the substance of a Prime Ministerial keynote. Every educator who has run one of those discussions in a classroom has been preparing students for this national conversation.
Education got a mention in the speech, too. The PM commented that the Education Minister was meeting his state and territory counterparts about AI in schools on the same day of the address, alongside work on the digital duty of care and the risks chatbots pose to children. In 2023 Australia was one of the first countries worldwide to produce a national framework for AI in schools. Once again, the standards should be set by us, in the interests of students, not copy/pasted from a vendor’s slide deck.
What happens next?
Of course, a speech is not legislation. The framework goes to National Cabinet next month, the bill is promised for early next year, and there is a long lobbying campaign between here and there. The tension at the heart of the strategy, courting “frontier AI investment” from the very companies whose practices the standards are designed to constrain, has not gone anywhere. And the education detail is still mostly to come. Take everything from the speech with a hefty pinch of salt until we see something more concrete.
But I’ll end on an (uncharacteristically?) optimistic note.
This is, in the Prime Minister’s words, “about Australia shaping the future rather than letting the future shape us”. For three years, anyone raising questions about copyright, environment, power and the many other ethical concerns of AI has been accused of “standing in the way of progress”. It turns out we were describing what progress looks like when a government attempts to set the terms of engagement up front.
For two decades, a handful of technology companies from a 40km long stretch of land in California have written the rules for how we conduct our online lives. They’ve hoarded and abused our personal, private data, tracked us after we explicitly told them to stop, and harvested our faces without consent. They’ve been found by courts to have run illegal monopolies and obstructed the very investigations meant to hold them to account, including systematically destroying evidence to keep it out of court.
They’ve built censorship tools for authoritarian governments and signed weapons contracts while deleting the promises they’d made not to. They’ve sat on their own research showing their products harm teenagers and, per unsealed filings, buried the internal work that proved it. They’ve poisoned the air of a majority-Black neighbourhood in Memphis with unpermitted gas turbines to train a chatbot. And they’ve shipped models that told distressed users what they wanted to hear, with lawsuits now alleging the consequences were fatal.
These are the companies that tech lobbyists want to hand the keys over to. Australia might be small in population, but not in leverage: our research and science punch well above our weight, and the industry needs our land, energy and water. This week, the Prime Minister said the rules for AI in this country will be written here, by us, and not by overseas technology companies. Now we hold him to it.
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