ARIA Chief Accuses OpenAI and Anthropic in Copyright Row

The head of Australia's recording industry says OpenAI and Anthropic are "asking Government for a free ride" on copyright.

Annabelle Herd, chief executive of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA), made the accusation to federal lawmakers. Her remarks were reported by Music Business Worldwide on 7 October.

She spoke at a hearing of Australia's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on Tuesday, 6 October. The committee is looking at how AI should be regulated. That includes copyright law, the rules that decide who can copy and reuse creative work and on what terms.

Herd told the committee the two companies want the Australian Government to support training of their frontier AI agents in Australia on the proviso they do not have to abide by copyright laws. Frontier agents are advanced AI systems designed to carry out tasks, which are built by feeding them very large amounts of existing material. Their reason, she said, is that working with rights holders would be too costly and complex.

She warned that changing the law to accommodate them would backfire. Australia would become a Trojan horse for Big AI, she said. It would also become a global safe haven for industrial-scale copyright exploitation.

The price would fall on creators. That was her central point. A song used for training without permission or payment leaves the writer and the performers out of the deal.

ARIA pressed the same message on its own website. It published a news item titled "Australia is being used to sell out the world's creators" on 6 October, according to ARIA.

Earlier parliamentary material gives context to the dispute. A 30 September 2025 committee transcript from the Parliament of Australia states that Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly used a dataset to train their AI tools, as recorded by Parliament Hansard.

For artists, the argument is about permission and payment. Herd's case is that if recordings can be used to build commercial AI products without a licence, the people who made them lose control over reuse of their work.