Anthony Albanese walked into a lecture hall at the University of Sydney on Wednesday and told the world's largest AI companies the price of building in Australia. They can have the land, the sunlight and the approvals. What they cannot have, he said, is free electricity, free water, or free books.
In a speech titled "AI in Australia's Interests," the Prime Minister announced his government will legislate a set of Australian Standards for AI, folding data centre siting, energy, water and copyright obligations into what he called "a single, national framework" — the first country, he claimed, to try it. He will seek agreement from premiers and chief ministers at a National Cabinet next month, with legislation aimed at Parliament early next year. Effective immediately, he established an Office of AI inside his own department, working with Industry Minister Tim Ayres and Assistant Minister for the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton.
The framing was less about model risk than about physical infrastructure — and leverage. "The expansion of AI requires a physical, material footprint," Albanese said. "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."
What the standards would require
Building on expectations floated in March, Albanese said the government will create a legal obligation for 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." Wire copy from AFP and Reuters rendered this as returning more power than consumed; the transcript says "at least as much."
The rules would also require data centres to "minimise their water use, maximise their energy efficiency, and pay for any additional water infrastructure required," and to avoid competing with housing for land. "Australia is the sunniest continent on earth but we're also the driest," Albanese said. He was explicit that none of this is risk-tiering: "It is not our goal to try and legislate for every possible eventuality or risk. That only creates the risk of Australia missing out on investment altogether." Data centre investment was the largest single contributor to Australia's economic growth in the three months to March, according to government figures.
The copyright line
"Not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs," Albanese said. "Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day." Then the line that led every bulletin: "No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist's control. That includes the artist's control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft." He conceded no one has solved it: "No country has got this right yet."
The timing was not accidental. Days earlier, the Australian Financial Review reported on a Treasury briefing note, released under FOI, prepared for Treasurer Jim Chalmers before an April meeting with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. The note states Anthropic's proposed US$15bn (A$21.6bn) investment in Australian AI infrastructure "is contingent on clarity of copyright settings," driven by a desire for "certainty over their liability to rights holders." Anthropic stopped short of seeking an outright exemption — Attorney-General Michelle Rowland ruled out a text and data mining exception in October 2025 — instead seeking clarity on existing obligations, including how to handle a "long tail" of smaller rights holders whose works are hard to licence individually.
Independent senator David Pocock has alleged a proposal to trade a copyright carve-out for at least $50bn in data centre investment plus roughly $350m a year for a creators' fund, calling it "the ultimate dirty deal." The government rejects that as inaccurate. In May, eighteen media and creative organisations opposed any reopening of copyright settings, arguing licensing deals already work across news, music and publishing.
Analysis: infrastructure as the regulatory hook
Most AI regulation to date governs the model. The EU AI Act sorts systems into risk tiers and attaches obligations to each; the United States has moved toward deregulation and preemption of state rules. Australia is attaching binding duties instead to the grid connection, the water licence and the land approval — the parts of the stack that cannot be relocated to a friendlier jurisdiction.
Whether that is smarter or merely easier is contested. The energy obligation is enforceable in a way a model-behaviour rule is not: a network operator can meter what a facility exports. The copyright half has no such lever. "Protecting artists' copyright is important, but it is technically very difficult to enforce or even remove that data from the model," said Professor Eduardo Velloso of the University of Sydney's School of Computer Science, who called the environmental provisions "excellent" while warning "the devil is in the details."
Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, co-director of the university's Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, was cooler. "The speech does not progress us very far," she said, noting that protecting creators "is not necessarily the same as 'protecting copyright' — many creators do not have copyright, because they've assigned it away or they never had it." Albanese "also strongly signalled he wants investment from Frontier Labs here," she said. "It's clear the discussions are not yet settled."
The creative sector heard something firmer. Author Anna Funder called the speech "a masterclass in explaining to US Big Tech why Australians trust governments to keep them safe," adding that AI firms "need to come to the table now to negotiate with writers and other copyright holders." The industry's position, as put to Treasury, is not that artists deserve nothing — it is that the licensing market is unnavigable at scale, and that legal uncertainty, not principle, stalls investment. That argument is harder to make here after Anthropic settled a US authors' class action last year for $1.5bn, roughly $3,000 per book across some 500,000 titles.
What to watch
National Cabinet next month is the first test: the energy, water and land obligations cut across state powers, and premiers courting their own data centre booms may resist a net-generation mandate. The second is whether the Attorney-General's Department lands on statutory licensing, collective licensing, or an enhanced voluntary regime — none of which would replicate US fair use or the EU's opt-out approach. Cabinet remains split, with Ayres and Charlton seen as more receptive to the investment case than Rowland and Arts Minister Tony Burke. The third is Anthropic, whose A$21.6bn is explicitly conditional on copyright certainty. Albanese has now defined certainty as artist control over price. Whether that is the clarity the company asked for, or the answer it feared, is the test of the whole framework.
“No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist's control. That includes the artist's control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft.”— Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia