Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says

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John Phelan, the ICMP’s managing director, told Guardian Australia AI companies were asking policymakers to “legitimise larceny”.

“They’re trying to strong-arm Australian policymakers into ‘if you don’t do this, we won’t invest’.”

In July, Anthony Albanese said it would be “theft” if artists did not retain control over whether their work was used to build and train AI, and what they were paid for its use.

But government and opposition members of a parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence appeared to revisit the issue this week, describing the current situation as a stalemate.

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AI companies’ demands

Phelan also pointed to an AI training dataset reported by the Atlantic in June, which contains more than 12m songs pulled from YouTube videos, including tracks from Minogue, Cave and Hilltop Hoods.

Google was approached for comment.

Phelan said 62 countries had considered making their own legal changes but none of the others had bought into AI companies’ demands.

“The world is very much watching what Australia does.”

“It’s fair to say the global music industry, as well as all creative industries worldwide we work with, are appalled by the idea of a statutory scheme or a government deal which would interfere with how Australian industries work and contract around the world.”

Anthropic’s special envoy, Jeffrey Bleich, told the AI committee last week the company was not trying to dictate terms, but had shared information with the Australian government about training and what the implications would be “with respect to our capacity to operate here”.

“You can’t license the entire internet. Billions and billions of information exists there which is available to be viewed and studied, and that’s essentially what training is,” he said.

“Under existing Australian law, it’s our understanding that that could be determined to be illegal if we weren’t able to find a licence with every single person who had rights within Australia.”

OpenAI’s chief of economic policy, Adam Cohen, said the fair use exception in US law “fundamentally protects” the development of new technology. He pointed to agreements made with News Corp and the Guardian as examples of where the company makes deals for the use of work, despite arguing US law did not require such.

“They’re seeing the legislative side as being the way to try to [find] a place to do business without licences, which will secure their future business model.”