Anthropic has urged the Australian government to permit AI training on copyrighted works under a conditional, opt-out arrangement, while public broadcasters ABC and SBS have called for tougher rules on AI companies. The proposals appear in submissions to a federal parliamentary inquiry, the Guardian reported on 1 October.
Key points
- Anthropic proposes conditional approval for model training after the government ruled out a broad text and data mining exception.
- The company suggests robots.txt signals to let rights holders tell crawlers not to access their work.
- ABC and SBS want AI companies included in the news bargaining incentive, which requires commercial deals with large media outlets.
- SBS says blocking training bots would place a continuing burden on rights holders.
Anthropic proposes conditional approval for training
The Labor government has ruled out a text and data mining exception, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised Australian creatives “the strongest possible protection”. Anthropic acknowledged that decision in its submission. Rather than seeking a broad exception, the company asked the government to consider what it called a narrow form of “conditional approval” for AI model training on copyrighted material.
Anthropic proposed “do not crawl” signals in robots.txt files, which tell automated systems what they may access. Under the arrangement it advocates, rights holders would have to signal that they do not want their material crawled. The company also said it was open to supporting Australian creators. These are proposals from a company seeking access to works that include news, books and music, rather than rules adopted by the government.
The company has tied its request for copyright certainty to its plans for Australian investment. Anthropic said it wanted clarity on local copyright law before committing to major infrastructure and urged support for training frontier models. It has discussed plans to invest billions in Australia, including in large data centres. AI Affairs previously reported that Anthropic and OpenAI had urged Australia to ease restrictions on AI training in parliamentary submissions.
Anthropic also urged the government to establish a licensing payment framework to help unlock data centre investment and attract Australian technology workers home from Silicon Valley, the Australian Financial Review reported on 22 September. A licensing framework would address payment for use of copyrighted work; the opt-out proposal would determine whether a developer could train on work whose rights holder had not blocked access.
ABC and SBS seek media rules for AI
The ABC wants AI companies subject to the copyright, defamation and privacy obligations that apply to media outlets. It called the present treatment of AI-based services “anti-competitive” and warned that more favourable rules for those services would accelerate what it described as the “cannibalisation” of the Australian news industry. Its complaint concerns AI services using publishers’ material while operating under different obligations from the organisations that produce it.
Both the ABC and SBS called for AI companies to come within the news bargaining incentive. The measure requires large technology platforms to make commercial deals with large media outlets to support journalism. Including AI companies would put another group of users of news content inside that bargaining arrangement, alongside platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.
SBS objected directly to Anthropic’s proposed means of giving publishers a choice. It said robots.txt mechanisms are “routinely ignored or bypassed”. Training bots change over time, the broadcaster said, leaving rights holders to monitor their sites and update blocks. SBS argued that AI companies should bear the responsibility for avoiding unauthorised use, rather than requiring publishers to keep identifying and excluding crawlers.
SBS also said large language models pose challenges to the sustainability of Australian news and to trust in information when they use news content without permission, attribution or compensation. Its objection extends beyond access for training: a publisher seeking payment for its work may also object to how an AI service uses that work and presents the resulting information to readers.
Australian media workers reject an opt-out
Media and entertainment workers have raised a further objection to placing the choice with rights holders. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance criticised a possible opt-out approach after reports of government discussions with AI companies. Its acting chief executive, Adam Portelli, said workers often had little power over licensing deals struck by publishers, record companies and media organisations, and frequently received little or no compensation from them, HR Leader reported on 28 September.
Portelli argued that an opt-out would do nothing about past uses of workers’ material and would give them insufficient control over future training. He called for workers to be able to control use of their work and receive fair compensation when it is used. His organisation also wants a right to remuneration that applies when AI systems use creative work, including through licensing arrangements entered into by rights holders.
