ARIA warns Australia risks becoming 'Trojan horse' for Big AI in copyright fight
Australia could become the Trojan horse for Big AI if it rewrites copyright law to suit OpenAI and Anthropic. That is the warning from ARIA, the music industry body, whose chief executive Annabelle Herd put the case to lawmakers this week. At stake is whether the most advanced AI systems can train in Australia on local creative work without following Australian copyright rules. Billboard
Herd, who is chief executive of ARIA and PPCA, told lawmakers that OpenAI and Anthropic want the Australian government to allow training of frontier AI agents in Australia without abiding by Australian copyright laws. Frontier systems are the largest and most capable models, and training is the process in which they learn patterns from existing text, images and music. OpenAI is reported to be in talks with the Australian government about hosting and training models in the country.
Her message was blunt. Herd said changing the Copyright Act, the law that decides who can copy and use creative work, to accommodate the two companies would create a global safe haven for industrial-scale copyright exploitation. She warned that proceeding on those terms would devastate the music industry and make Australia a pariah for rights holders around the world.
ARIA set out the same warning in a news post on 6 October titled ‘Australia is being used to sell out the world’s creators’. ARIA The post frames Canberra’s decision as one with consequences beyond Australia, because any exception granted in Sydney or Melbourne would affect how music from elsewhere is used to build models.
Herd said ARIA and PPCA are not opposed to companies doing frontier AI training in Australia. It should happen on Australia’s terms, not theirs, she said. In her words, the AI companies should come to the negotiating table, not to the Prime Minister’s office.
The companies had earlier urged Australia to rethink limits on using Australian creative content for AI training, a call reported on 22 September. Reuters ARIA’s earlier submission to the Senate inquiry on Adopting Artificial Intelligence said any regulatory framework should prioritise transparency, meaning AI developers would have to disclose what they trained on. A committee in the United Kingdom’s upper house took a similar line in March, saying Britain should back a licensing-first approach rather than let AI firms freely mine copyrighted material for commercial training. Reuters
For musicians and fans, this means money and permission. A licence is a deal that sets a fee and conditions before a song can be used. Without one, artists and labels say they have no way to know their work was used, let alone get paid for it.
