The fight over Australia AI copyright has a price tag: tens of billions in datacentres. The prize for AI firms is the right to train on the country’s books, music and journalism.
Australia has become the latest test of a question every government now faces. How much of a nation’s creative work can AI companies train on, and at what price.
The answer is splitting the governing Labor party and drawing protests from authors and musicians. It is also, according to reporting by The Guardian, tempting ministers with the promise of a datacentre boom. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is due to set out his thinking in a major AI speech this week.
What the carve-out would do
At the centre of the Australia AI copyright fight sits a proposed “text and data mining” exemption. It would let AI firms scrape copyrighted material to train their models without breaching Australian law. The same work already trains ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. The government ruled the idea out last year after a backlash from creators.
