Not just ‘memes’: Andrew Hastie warns Australia could become ‘supplicant state’ without AI

Without a sovereign AI model Australia will become a “supplicant state”, Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie has warned, as OpenAI reveals it is in negotiations with the Albanese government over copyright rules.

Ms Hastie told the Sydney Dialogue on Monday that without a frontier AI model – one that was at the bleeding edge of the emerging technology – “we are going to be a supplicant state, not a sovereign state”.

“People think it’s making memes on ChatGPT, (but) we’re talking about the global order being changed and Australia falling behind.

Speaking later, OpenAI vice-president for global policy Ann O’Leary reportedly told the NSW conference the tech giant was “very eager to have a bigger and broader relationship” with Australia.

“I don’t have to tell any of you how important Australia is from a geopolitical standpoint,” she said.

“We very much recognise that having a diversification of where we train is going to be important as you move forward.”

Anthony Albanese earlier this year announced the first nationwide plan for AI, which the government claimed would balance the potential for economic growth with widely warned environmental harms, including theft of Australian copyright to train AI models.

Mr Hastie’s warning comes after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei last week called for a slowdown in AI development to allow safeguard mechanisms to catch up – a proposal Donald Trump has so far rejected, citing the threat posed by Chinese AI models.

A researcher at Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, also warned AI was advancing so quickly that there was a greater than 10 per cent chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.

Asked about the warning, Angus Taylor on Monday said the government “had a role to play”, but “companies need to do the right thing, too”.

“I think absolutely central to this is our cyber defences as a country,” the Opposition Leader said.

“The way we will make that work is by having a close relationship with the United States administration so our companies, our businesses, our government gets access to those models early for cyber defence purposes.

“But, this has not been on the priority list of the Prime Minister because he’s too busy telling Australians how wonderful the economy is when Australians know they’re getting poorer.”

The US government ordered Anthropic in June to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythic 5 models to foreign nationals. That order was later rescinded.