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.
The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, killed a Productivity Commission proposal in October. She opened talks on alternatives, including a paid licensing model. Officially, the exemption is off the table.
The ‘ultimate dirty deal’ #
Creators are not convinced. Steady lobbying, plus a whistleblower tipoff to the independent senator David Pocock, has revived fears the carve-out could return. In late June, Pocock said he had learned of an industry push to trade a copyright exemption for datacentre investment.
The alleged sums: at least $50bn for datacentres, plus a creators’ fund worth some $350m a year. He called it the “ultimate dirty deal”. The government rejected the account as inaccurate. Days later the Australian Financial Review reported that Anthropic was seeking a deal along those lines. It is part of a plan to make Australia its second home outside the United States.
A government at war with itself #
The row has exposed a split inside Labor. The industry minister, Tim Ayres, and the digital economy assistant minister, Andrew Charlton, are the keenest on courting AI money. Rowland and the arts minister, Tony Burke, want to protect creatives.
Albanese has tried to reassure both sides. He points to his record of making tech firms pay for local content, while calling the issues “complex”. His speech on Wednesday will be a vision statement, not firm policy, unlikely to settle much.
The leverage question #
Underneath the copyright fight is a bigger bet on datacentres. Australia is an attractive host: stable, land-rich and with access to renewable power. Frontier AI companies have told the government that copyright law is their “main barrier” to building training operations there. Ed Husic, the former industry minister, thinks Canberra is moving too fast.
“We have negotiating leverage here”, he said, warning against an impulse buy the country might regret. Others in Labor counter that opposing datacentres is a form of nimbyism. Clear national rules, they argue, would secure a share of the global race.
Why it matters beyond Australia #
The stakes reach past Canberra. Australia is wrestling with a question now open across Europe. There, text and data mining exemptions are already law, and creators are fighting over how far the opt-outs stretch. Newspapers are suing AI firms over training data, and artists are pressing disclosure claims in court.
Datacentre money is the new variable. Governments must now weigh that investment against the rights of the people whose work trains the models. Australia is about to show what a creative economy is worth once an industry offers billions to bypass it.
The public looks wary. Only 22% of Australians think AI brings more opportunity than risk.
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