Albanese says the AI standards bill lands this year, with copyright inside it.
Curated by Roger Hanney · Throughline Advisory · Sydney · Monday 21 September 2026
The AI standards now have a legislative date, and it is this year.
One sentence in a California press conference moved Australia's AI law forward by about a quarter. It also put copyright inside the same bill.
The Australian Standards for AI are the federal government's planned rules for AI and large data centres. Anthony Albanese announced them at Sydney University on 15 July 2026. They cover safety, energy and water use, and sovereign capability. A new Office of AI inside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is drafting them. Until this weekend, legislation was expected in early 2027.
On Sunday 20 September, speaking at Apple Park in Cupertino, the Prime Minister gave a different date. The official transcript records him saying "we'll have legislation before the end of the year on Australian AI standards". He added that protecting intellectual property will be part of it.
The record is not yet consistent. The ABC's report from Cupertino, filed the same day, says he hoped to legislate early next year. The two statements fit together only if a bill is introduced in 2026 and passed in 2027. Parliament's remaining sitting weeks will show which reading is right. Plan on the earlier date.
Sources: Prime Minister of Australia, transcript, 20 Sep 2026, ABC News, 20 Sep 2026 and Baker McKenzie, Aug 2026.
Three deadlines fall between 30 November and 31 December.
The sequence matters more than any single date. The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence is the parliamentary inquiry set up on 20 August to examine AI adoption and regulation. It reports on 30 November. A bill before year end would land within weeks of that report, or ahead of it. Anyone who made a submission should assume drafting is already under way.
Both leaked options make creators opt out of AI training.
The government ruled out a blanket exemption for AI training late last year. The papers show what it is weighing instead.
Australian copyright law currently requires an AI company to get permission before it copies a work to train a model. The ABC published leaked consultation documents on 15 September. They describe two options from confidential talks held earlier in the month.
The commercial pressure is on the record. A Treasury briefing note released under freedom of information says Anthropic's proposed investment is "contingent on clarity of copyright settings". Spruson & Ferguson, an intellectual property law firm, puts that investment at US$15 billion and 1.4 gigawatts of data centre capacity. OpenAI's written submission to the parliamentary AI inquiry says copyright policy is part of its investment environment. Executives from both companies met federal ministers last week.
The politics run the other way. The Coalition called for the full consultation material to be released. The Greens said AI companies should pay for Australian content like everyone else. The musician Holly Rankin, who performs as Jack River, said the proposals shift the burden of protection onto individuals. In Cupertino the Prime Minister said creators must stay in control and be properly paid. He did not rule out an opt-out model.
Sources: ABC News, 15 Sep 2026, ABC News, 16 Sep 2026, Spruson & Ferguson, 16 Jul 2026 and PM transcript, 20 Sep 2026.
An opt-out regime applies to every organisation that publishes. Product copy, manuals, research, photography and training material are all copyright works. Under either option, the default for that content becomes available for training unless you say otherwise.
The duty of care bill travelled with the Prime Minister to Cupertino.
A second technology bill is in exposure draft, and it already has an opponent.
The digital duty of care is a proposed legal obligation on social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm to users. The government released an exposure draft this month. One part, branded My Feed, My Way, would let users switch off algorithmic recommendation. The bill is due in Parliament later this year.
The Coalition said on 10 September that it opposes the bill in its current form. It cited weak protection for free speech and journalism, and too much ministerial power. The Prime Minister said in Cupertino that he found that position extraordinary, because only a draft exists. Apple's executive chairman Tim Cook showed him new parental controls now available in Australia.
Two technology bills now compete for the same few sitting weeks. Both need Senate votes the government does not hold.
Sources: ABC News, 8 Sep 2026, Al Jazeera, 20 Sep 2026 and PM transcript, 20 Sep 2026.
California gave its experts 59 days to design a shutdown rule.
The state where most frontier AI companies are based moved on the same weekend, and its deadline falls before Canberra's.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-9-26 on Friday 18 September. It convenes an expert group to recommend changes to California's AI safety laws within two months. Two proposals are named. One would require independent third parties to write safety plans for frontier AI companies. The other would require an emergency shutoff for frontier models, which the governor's office calls a kill switch.
The order does not impose a shutdown requirement. It commissions the design of one. It also accelerates two laws signed earlier this month. Senate Bill 813 creates a framework for certifying independent organisations that verify AI systems. Assembly Bill 1405 creates a state registry and standards for AI auditors.
The background is a public argument among the builders. On 12 September Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. It argued for slowing capability gains and for outside evaluators with staff-level access. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI said publicly that they agreed. President Trump has rejected new regulation. He meets President Xi Jinping at the White House this week.
For an Australian buyer the practical point is audit. If California certifies independent AI verifiers from 2027, their reports become something you can request in procurement. Ask your vendors now whether they expect to be covered.
Sources: Office of the Governor of California, 18 Sep 2026, Executive Order N-9-26, signed text, AFP via Khaleej Times, 13 Sep 2026 and ABC News, 20 Sep 2026.
The one AI date already in law is 80 days away.
From 10 December 2026, the Privacy Act requires an organisation's privacy policy to say when personal information is used in substantially automated decisions that significantly affect people. The obligation sits under Australian Privacy Principle 1, the rule governing open and transparent handling of personal information. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the privacy regulator, has consulted on guidance. Unlike the standards bill, this date does not depend on a Senate vote. A register of your automated decisions is the working document behind the disclosure.
Source: OAIC, consultation on guidance for transparency in automated decision-making.
A sentence at a press conference is not a legislative program.
The lead treats the Prime Minister's words as a date. The counter-case says they were an answer to a hostile question, given off the cuff, far from the drafters in Canberra. The national broadcaster heard early next year in the same session. No bill, exposure draft or sitting calendar entry supports the earlier reading.
The Senate arithmetic points the same way. The Coalition and the Greens have both rejected an opt-out model. A bill that bundles copyright with the standards inherits that opposition. The likelier outcome on this reading is a standards bill in 2027 with copyright split off, or a 2026 bill that says little about copyright at all.
"An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies."
Write the AI crawler rules in your robots.txt file yourself.
Use case. Anyone responsible for a company website. A robots.txt file is a plain text file at the root of a site that tells automated crawlers which pages they may fetch. AI companies publish the names their crawlers use. Ten lines of text let you allow search indexing and refuse training collection, or the reverse. It takes about 20 minutes.
Tips. The file is a request. It is not a lock, and a crawler can ignore it. Keep server logs so you can see which crawlers visit and whether they comply. Decide the commercial question first: some businesses want to be read by AI assistants because customers ask them for recommendations. Review the file each quarter, because crawler names change.
Learn more, free, no paywall: Google's introduction to robots.txt for the syntax, OpenAI's published list of its crawlers as an example of vendor documentation, and RFC 9309, the formal standard.
List the content you own before the law decides its default.
Every option on the table changes what happens to published work when the owner does nothing. Spend an hour this week listing what your organisation publishes, who holds the copyright, and which AI vendors already process it under contract. Add one column: train, do not train, or licence. That list is the input to an opt-out, to a licensing conversation, and to the 10 December privacy disclosure. Building that register with a commercial lens is the engagement Throughline Advisory runs: throughlineadvisory.au.