OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, arrives at the parliamentary inquiry where he apologised again for the hack on Medicare last month. Photograph: Hollie Adams/ReutersView image in fullscreenOpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, arrives at the parliamentary inquiry where he apologised again for the hack on Medicare last month. Photograph: Hollie Adams/ReutersAnthropic tells AI inquiry it ‘never tried to dictate’ Australian copyright rulesOpenAI acknowledges ‘more work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people’ as ABC says copyright laws do not need changing Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Anthropic has told a parliamentary inquiry on AI that it is not seeking to dictate copyright law on model training, but the current rules make it “impossible” to train AI in Australia.OpenAI has used an appearance before the parliamentary committee to apologise again to Australia about the hack on Medicare last month, on the same day media and entertainment organisations argued weakening Australian copyright law for AI model training would leave artists as “roadkill”.Tuesday morning’s hearing of the joint parliamentary hearing on artificial intelligence largely focused on copyright licensing for AI training in Australia, amid concerns companies such as Anthropic were pushing the Australian government to adopt an opt-out model, requiring rights holders to specifically opt out of allowing AI to train on their content.Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam AltmanRead moreAnthropic’s special envoy, the former US ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich, told the committee that Anthropic had “never tried to dictate to Australia” on copyright.“We’ve just shared information about how the training works, and then discussed what its implications would be with respect to our capacity to operate here,” he said.Anthropic suggests current Australian laws mean AI companies need to obtain a licence for the use of every piece of content on the internet as training material. Bleich said this was “technically impossible”.Anthropic was keen to explore what the Australian government wants to do to incentivise training in Australia, and Bleich said Australia could shape frontier models if they were trained here, otherwise it would ultimately rely on models trained elsewhere.Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailAhead of an appearance before the committee on Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI released its opening statement in which the company apologised for its AI agents attacking a number of Australian government websites in June. The multibillion-dollar company notified the government via an email to a public-facing address three months after the breach.“I want to begin with an apology. During internal training and evaluation, our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to. That should not have happened. We also should have handled our response better,” OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, told the committee on Tuesday afternoon.“We are sorry, and we know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. We are committed to doing that work.”Kwon said he would answer questions about what happened and what changes were being made, while also arguing that AI can improve lives.Following the revelation of another hack – on the NSW national parks and wildlife service last week – Kwon said he would tell the committee that more parties would be notified “promptly and directly” should more incidents be discovered in OpenAI’s ongoing review.Anthropic’s head of safeguards, Dave Orr, told the committee the company had reviewed hundreds of millions of transcripts of its models and had not found any cases in which it interacted with Australian government systems in an unauthorised way.He could not say whether Anthropic’s customers may have used the models on Australian government systems, given the company’s “zero data retention” policy.Hearings are set down from Tuesday until Friday this week.‘Artists will become roadkill’Annabelle Herd, the chief executive of the Australian Recording Industry Association (Aria), told the committee that “Australia’s artists will be the roadkill in the rush” to make deals with AI companies, and Aria was not against AI frontier model training being done in Australia but it should be done on “our terms”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There is nothing less sovereign than rewriting our laws to suit foreign company commercial interests, done the way that big AI is proposing,” she said. “It will devastate the music industry and make Australia a pariah for rights holders globally.”She said Anthropic and OpenAI were “asking the government for a free ride” and the creative sector was calling on the government not to cave in to their demands.The ABC told the committee Australia’s existing copyright regime was “completely adequate”.British celebrities beat AI companies lobbying to get free use of their work. They have a warning for AustraliaRead moreThe ABC’s head of content and legal operations, Kate Gilchrist, said an opt-out system as proposed by AI companies would place burdens and costs on rights holders, as it would require ongoing surveillance to see whether copyright material was being used.She said for the ABC, it would mean ensuring every site on which the ABC publishes material had opted out.“We cannot scour the internet and ensure we are opting out on all of those different sites of publication. It simply does not work,” she said.Gilchrist said she suspected ABC content had been scraped already.The union representing the entertainment and news sector, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), has called for an equitable remuneration scheme that would put fees on companies across the AI technology stack.“Revenue would support two things: direct payments to creative and media workers whose work contributes to AI systems. And secondly, a cultural fund supporting Australian live entertainment, screen music, public interest journalism and cultural activity,” the MEAA’s acting chief executive, Adam Portelli, said.OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft were expected to give evidence on Tuesday afternoon.Explore more on these topicsAustralian mediaAI (artificial intelligence)Australian politicsOpenAIMedicare AustralianewsShareReuse this content