AINEWS
Anthony Albanese carries the question to UN General Assembly talks this week, as Australian writers and artists warn that letting AI train on their work without asking would gut copyright protections.
Australia's prime minister has declined to rule out an opt-out copyright regime for AI training, telling reporters in California that the question is one he expects to surface at United Nations AI talks this week.
The position, signalled during Anthony Albanese's closed-doors visit to Apple Park in Cupertino on Saturday, places Australia between two competing models for how the world's AI laboratories are allowed to learn from books, journalism, music, film, and code. Under an opt-in system, a model maker must ask before using a creator's work. Under opt-out, the work is fair game unless the creator takes affirmative steps to keep it out.
"I certainly accept that there are risks, and that's why we need to mitigate. That's why we need to act, and that is something that's recognised by the companies themselves," Albanese said on the Apple campus, according to The Age.
On copyright specifically, the prime minister told reporters: "Part of that will be protecting intellectual property... [The debate] shows the need to regulate and the need as well to acknowledge that sitting on the sideline is not an option because this is a global phenomenon that we are having."
Australian writers, artists and other creators have already told the government that an opt-out regime would "undermine fundamental copyright protections", according to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The mechanism is the point: a handful of AI labs train on petabytes of scraped material; millions of individual creators would each need to register their objection.
In practice, opt-out shifts the paperwork from the company doing the training to the person whose work is being consumed. The asymmetry favours the largest model makers, and the systems for registering objections at scale do not exist.
Albanese's formulation is hedged in two directions. He "left the door open" and "did not rule out" the policy, casting a line both to the AI industry, which wants legal clarity, and to the creative sector, which wants copyright enforcement to mean what it says.
The choice will not be made in Australia alone. Albanese arrives at the United Nations General Assembly this week, where AI governance is on the agenda and where Foreign Minister Penny Wong has already framed Australia's role as one of the "fellow middle powers" shaping the global AI response.
The prime minister's own statement on AI, published ahead of the visit, leans into the same line: Australia is too small to dictate the technology's trajectory, but too digitised to abstain from setting its rules. Copyright is one of the few areas where a mid-sized democracy can plausibly lead rather than follow.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has separately pressed the UN Security Council to anchor AI governance in existing bodies rather than build new ones, a position that lines up with what an opt-out regime would require: a registry, a complaint mechanism and an enforcement arm that does not yet exist.
Albanese's hour-long meeting with Apple chief executive Tim Cook was conducted behind closed doors. Media were briefly allowed on site for a product demonstration of Apple's new foldable Duo phone, then barred from filming the meeting, the buildings, or Apple employees. The prime minister used the visit to spruik Australia's "pioneering" social media ban for under-16s.
The visit arrived a day after United States President Donald Trump announced an "AI force" on his social media account, writing: "We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!" The post is a parallel US announcement, not a direct line into Albanese's copyright calculation, but it sets the geopolitical frame: a middle-power democracy will need to decide where it sits between Washington and Beijing before the year ends.
The strongest falsifier for this story is that "did not rule out" turns out to be diplomatic courtesy. If Australia never formally positions on opt-out at the General Assembly, the Cupertino visit was stagecraft rather than a pivot.
The strongest signal it was a pivot would be a copyright opt-out proposal filed in the UN General Assembly's AI working group, or a domestic scoping paper commissioned by the Treasury or the Attorney-General's department before the prime minister's plane lands home.
The choice is binary, and the calendar is short.