Anthropic asks Australia for "conditional approval" to train AI on copyrighted works via opt-out

What happened

Anthropic has urged the Australian government to grant AI companies a "narrow form of conditional approval" to train models on Australian copyrighted works under an opt-out model, conceding it will not secure a blanket copyright exemption. The proposal appears in Anthropic's submission (no. 305) to parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, published ahead of committee hearings in Sydney where Anthropic and OpenAI executives are expected to appear. Under the plan, training on potentially copyrighted material would be approved for companies that meet conditions such as respecting "technical protection measures or 'do not crawl' signals through robots.txt" and meeting a proposed set of AI standards. Anthropic tied the proposal to its investment in the Western Downs Digital Park data centre in Queensland and a push for "frontier model training" in Australia. Australia's public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, told the same inquiry the opposite: AI firms should face the same copyright, defamation and privacy rules as media outlets, with the ABC warning that unequal treatment "will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry." Both broadcasters want AI companies brought under the news bargaining incentive so they pay deals with news outlets. The Australian government has already ruled out a broad text-and-data-mining copyright exception.

Why it matters to creators

This is the first major AI company's formal bid for an opt-out-based training regime in a national legislature, shifting the burden from "ask permission" to "creators must block." The SBS explicitly rejected robots.txt as protection, saying such mechanisms "are routinely ignored or bypassed." Australia's choice is likely to be watched by other governments deciding the same question, so creators and publisher groups everywhere have a stake in the outcome.

What is not yet known

Whether the committee or government will take up the conditional-approval model; what specific conditions or investment requirements might be attached; and whether any compensation mechanism for rights holders would be included.