Anthropic has urged the Australian government to consider granting "conditional approval" for AI companies to train their models on Australian copyrighted works under an opt-out regime, in a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry that also reveals the company has conceded it will not win a blanket copyright exemption. The maker of Claude couched its proposal in economic promise — claiming AI could "transform the Australian economy, drive a new wave of productivity" — but Australia's public broadcasters have fired back with a stark warning that unchecked AI development threatens to cannibalize the nation's news industry.
The exchange, reported by The Guardian, is part of an inquiry by the federal parliament's joint select committee on artificial intelligence, which will hold hearings in Sydney next week. Executives from Anthropic are scheduled to attend, along with representatives of OpenAI — whose appearance comes after the company admitted one of its AI agents accessed Services Australia data in June. For continuous coverage of the global fight over AI and copyright, AI Buzz Wire follows the latest artificial intelligence developments across dozens of jurisdictions. For more context on this story, see our ongoing more AI stories.
Anthropic's Proposal: Conditional Approval and 'Do Not Crawl'
In its newly published submission, Anthropic acknowledged that broad copyright exceptions for AI training — including the so-called text and data mining exemption that technology companies have sought in multiple countries — "have not received widespread support and have been ruled out by the Government." Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised "the strongest possible protection" for Australian creatives, effectively closing the door on the exemption model.
As an alternative, Anthropic proposed that Australia "permit AI model training through a narrow form of conditional approval," under which copyright holders could opt out of having their work used for training. The company pointed to "do not crawl" signals in robots.txt files — the decades-old web standard that tells automated bots what they may access — as a mechanism copyright holders could use to signal their preferences, and said it was "open" to supporting Australian creators.
Anthropic also argued that Australia should "provide legal certainty under copyright that brings AI developers to the table while advancing its national cultural interests," and touted plans to invest billions of dollars in Australia, including large new data centers.
The Broadcasters' Rebuttal: Unequal Treatment and Erosion
The ABC and SBS, Australia's public broadcasters, rejected the framing in their own submissions. The ABC demanded that AI companies be subject to the same copyright, defamation, and privacy rules that govern media outlets, warning that the current imbalance will drive a "cannibalisation" of mainstream news.
"As publishers, AI-based services are currently unregulated and receive more favourable treatment than established Australian media," the ABC wrote. "This unequal treatment will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry." SBS was similarly blunt, arguing that large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude pose challenges "to the sustainability of the Australian news industry and the erosion of information integrity and public trust through their use of news content without permission, attribution or compensation."
The broadcasters also dismissed Anthropic's robots.txt proposal as inadequate. "Robots.txt mechanisms are routinely ignored or bypassed, and the blocking of ever-evolving training bots increases the burden on rightsholders to monitor and update protections, when the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing," the ABC's submission said.
The News Bargaining Incentive Becomes the Battleground
Both broadcasters called on the government to bring AI companies within the scope of Australia's news bargaining incentive — the mechanism that has forced major technology platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat to strike commercial deals compensating Australian publishers for news content. Extending that regime to AI developers would require companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to pay for the journalism their chatbots summarize, paraphrase, and in some cases reproduce.
The demand lands amid a global tightening on AI and content rights. The United Kingdom has considered allowing creators to block licensing negotiations, the European Union's AI Act imposes transparency obligations on training data, and a wave of litigation from publishers and artists is working through courts in the United States. Australia's inquiry has become one of the clearest tests of whether the opt-out approach — beloved by AI developers for its low friction — can coexist with a media sector that believes it is being strip-mined.
Anthropic's submission described "light and shade" in AI's development, acknowledging "serious implications for Australia's national security, the resilience of its critical infrastructure" alongside the economic upside. That candor may not be enough for the broadcasters, whose submissions make clear they see the copyright question not as a licensing detail but as a fight for the survival of public interest journalism. The Sydney hearings next week will put that argument — and Anthropic's executives — directly in front of the lawmakers who will decide it.
What Happens Next in the Australian Inquiry
The joint select committee's Sydney hearings will be the first time Australian lawmakers question AI executives directly since the Services Australia incident reframed the debate around competence as much as copyright. Lawmakers are expected to press Anthropic on how an opt-out regime would work in practice: who verifies robots.txt compliance, what penalties apply when training bots ignore the signal, and whether "conditional approval" would amount to a license imposed on rights holders who lack the resources to police the web.
The government, for its part, has shown little appetite for the blanket exemptions the technology sector seeks. With a Senate that has already probed AI executives over safety, Canberra appears set to test whether the news bargaining model — Australia's signature intervention in platform economics — can be extended to the companies now consuming journalism at industrial scale. The outcome will be watched closely in London, Brussels, and Washington, where lawmakers face the same question: whether the machines that summarize the news should have to pay for it.
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