Anthropic Pushes Opt-Out Copyright Model as ABC Warns of News Cannibalisation

Anthropic has urged the Albanese government to consider conditional approval for technology companies to train artificial intelligence models on Australian copyrighted works under an opt-out model. The proposal would allow training by default while preserving a mechanism for rights holders to exclude their material, according to The Guardian.

The company accepted that broader copyright exceptions such as a text and data mining exception have been ruled out by the Australian government. It called instead for legal certainty under copyright that brings AI developers to the table while advancing its national cultural interests. The Labor government has ruled out a text and data mining exemption for AI training.

Anthropic said it plans to invest billions in Australia including large new datacentres and urged the government to support frontier model training. The investment pledge links infrastructure deployment to training policy. Canberra has not agreed to the opt-out framework.

The ABC, in a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry, demanded AI companies be subject to the same copyright, defamation and privacy rules as media outlets. The public broadcaster warned that unequal treatment of unregulated AI services will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry. The language frames AI systems as publishers for liability purposes rather than neutral intermediaries.

The ABC and SBS suggested the Australian government include AI companies in the news bargaining incentive requiring commercial deals with large media outlets to support journalism. SBS said AI large language models such as ChatGPT or Claude are challenges to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through use of news content without permission, attribution or compensation.

On process, Australia's joint select committee on AI will hold hearings in Sydney next week with executives from Anthropic and OpenAI expected to attend. Separately, Anthropic will not appear before an Australian Senate committee hearing on AI on October 1, 2026, according to Reuters. The two settings involve different committees and dates.

Anthropic denied it has any deal or negotiations with the ABC to license its archive of content, according to AFR. The denial clarifies that no licensing arrangement underpins the current policy exchange.

The broader context here is a negotiation over who sets the default. An opt-out regime keeps the burden on publishers and creators to monitor and object, while preserving large-scale ingestion for model developers. A permission-first regime reverses that burden and forces licensing before ingestion. Both sides invoke sustainability, one for frontier capacity and data-centre investment, the other for news production and cultural production.

Looking at what this means for policymakers, the immediate test is whether legal certainty can be constructed without reopening the text and data mining fight. Conditional approval suggests conditions on transparency, remuneration or access for Australian researchers and cultural institutions could be attached. The public broadcasters are pushing to tie any certainty for developers to enforceable obligations on compensation, attribution and parity under media law. The Sydney hearings will show how far either side moves from those opening positions.