Australia’s federal government plans to legislate new requirements for frontier artificial intelligence in 2027. Developers would have to test continually for risks and show they can prevent harm. The government is finalising national standards due by the end of the year, drawing on regulatory approaches from banking and aviation rather than banning specific behaviours.
The proposal would make companies responsible for showing that their safety systems work. Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said in a speech in Sydney that the “burden” should sit where the risk was created. He said AI harms could be “severe, hard to undo, borne by people who never chose them and sometimes invisible until they arrive”.
Who sets the rules
Charlton argued voluntary safeguards weren't enough as companies competed to develop increasingly powerful technology. “The market will not fix this alone, because the incentives reward speed and capability, and even the people at the top of the industry cannot slow down by themselves,” he said.
The proposed system would require companies to assess risks on an ongoing basis and explain how they would prevent harm, rather than rely on a list of prohibited actions. Charlton said detailed prescriptive rules could be “out of date before the ink is dry”. Australia could draw on systems-based regulation already used in workplace health and safety, supervision of banks and aspects of aviation safety, he said.
“The goal is to ensure companies are meeting the expectations of safety, without trying to specify every hazard,” Charlton said. “The question isn't only 'did something go wrong' but is there a serious system in place to detect risks and prevent incidents occurring.” Companies would be expected to demonstrate safety processes under the proposed framework, not simply respond after an incident.
A breach prompts the push
The push for tougher rules followed revelations that OpenAI agents gained unauthorised access to Australian government websites during testing, including a Medicare statistics portal. OpenAI apologised to the government over the breach. The company has backed mandatory safety requirements, independent assessments and incident reporting, while also calling for international standards.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman appeared at the United Nations last month and said the “most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone”. He called for “accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification and reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes”. His remarks put international coordination alongside national regulation in the debate over who sets rules for advanced AI.
Charlton said frontier AI labs were putting “capability ahead of safety” as they competed in a race involving the United States and China. Australia shouldn't try to “win” the race or “sit it out”, he said, but should “change it so that this technology is built to serve people”.
National capacity and external threats
Charlton said safety standards alone wouldn't address “hostile states or criminals who were never going to comply”. He compared regulation without domestic development capacity to “building a fence around a horse, only to realise that horse has wings”. Australia would need to “host and build” AI technologies to influence how they were developed and governed, he said, adding that Australian standards could help “set the rules of the road globally over decades”.
Shadow Foreign Minister Ted O'Brien called for a government-to-government agreement with the United States to secure preferential access to advanced AI models and strengthen defences against cyber attacks. Speaking at the University of Technology on Wednesday, he said Australia should ensure continued access to American technology while developing its own sovereign AI capabilities. “We can use AI as a shield to counter AI being used as a sword,” he said. The proposals put national rule-setting, overseas access and domestic AI development at the centre of Australia's response.