Independent Senator David Pocock has written to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging the government to prohibit tech companies from training AI models on Australian content without permission.

The call lands on ground that is already legally contested. Existing Australian copyright law requires AI companies to obtain authorisation before using Australian creative works, data and other copyrighted material for model training — there is no broad research or text-and-data-mining exception of the kind that has been carved out in some other jurisdictions. Pocock's push is less about creating new rights than enforcing the ones already on the books and, potentially, making the prohibition explicit in statute.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland moved to close off one avenue for the tech sector in late October 2025, ruling out a copyright exemption that would have allowed companies to mine copyrighted content for AI training without licence or payment. That position has held since, and Pocock's letter to Albanese is, in effect, pressure to go further — from a policy posture of "we won't give them a free pass" to active legislative prohibition backed by enforcement.

Pocock has been consistent on the broader AI policy front. In additional comments submitted to the Senate Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence, he advocated for legislation to prohibit the generation and distribution of deepfake videos and voice clones — a related but distinct concern about synthetic media rather than training data. Together, the two positions sketch out a coherent framework: protect Australian content at the input stage and prohibit its weaponised outputs.

The government has been building out its institutional architecture in parallel. The Australian AI Safety Institute was established in November 2025, and the Attorney-General's Department convened a Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group — CAIRG — in late October 2025 to work through three priority areas in AI and copyright policy. The reference group process is ongoing, and the government has been careful not to get ahead of it publicly.

That caution creates a political dynamic Pocock is deliberately exploiting. By writing directly to Albanese rather than waiting on CAIRG's deliberations, he is applying crossbench pressure at the prime ministerial level and making the issue harder to park in a working-group holding pattern. It is a familiar move for an independent senator with limited numbers but strong leverage on a government without a Senate majority.

The substantive policy question is genuinely difficult. A prohibition on training AI on Australian content without consent would be among the more ambitious interventions in the world, and its practical enforceability against offshore model developers is an open question. Australian rights-holders — publishers, musicians, screenwriters, visual artists — have been vocal about wanting both recognition and remuneration, but they are not uniformly agreed on the mechanism. Some favour a licensing framework; others want an outright prohibition on unconsented scraping, with penalties that bite.

For the government, the politics cut in multiple directions. Labor has relationships with both the creative industries and the tech sector, and is attempting to position Australia as an attractive destination for AI investment while not being seen to sell out domestic content creators. Rowland's October 2025 ruling against a blanket exemption was the easy call. What Pocock is asking for is harder: affirmative legislation that would put Australian law in explicit conflict with the operating assumptions of every major foundation-model developer.

Whether Albanese responds substantively or routes the letter back through the CAIRG process will be a reasonable indicator of how much political bandwidth the government is prepared to spend on this before an election cycle forces the issue one way or another.