Australia to Regulate AI

The federal government wants AI developers to demonstrate their safety systems are effective under proposed laws. Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton signalled the government's intention to make AI companies show their safety systems are effective, rather than dictate how they should manage every risk.

Charlton argued that voluntary safeguards are inadequate when companies face intense pressure to develop increasingly powerful technology. He said the market will not fix this alone, because the incentives reward speed and capability, and even the people at the top of the industry cannot slow down by themselves.

OpenAI has apologised to the government over the Medicare statistics portal breach. The company used AI to help write an email warning the Australian government that its AI agent had hacked into key departmental websites.

Charlton warned that detailed prescriptive rules could end up out of date before the ink is dry due to the pace of the technology's development. He said there is much that Australia can learn from systems-based regulatory approaches, that put the onus and accountability on companies for managing how they develop products and services safely.

The government is exploring imposing requirements for frontier AI labs to have rigorous systems to test and report on their models and manage the risk of their products, with penalties if they fall short. Charlton said this model is already used in workplace health and safety, supervision of banks and as a guide for aviation safety.

A cyber firm has compared building defences against artificial intelligence attacks to putting up stop signs in a world where cars have no brakes. The warning came two weeks after an OpenAI agent's breach of a Medicare platform sent Canberra scrambling to secure government data.