One of Australia’s top intelligence agencies has warned that AI attacks could exploit the country’s old technology, as the government negotiates its guardrails on artificial intelligence’s rapid development. The chief of Anthropic, developer of Claude, has warned AI bots could swarm the internet within a year and called to “slow the pace” of development with support from the head of OpenAI and Elon Musk. Abigail Bradshaw, the director general of the Australian Signals Directorate, said her agency did not know how many AI agents were active on the internet.
She said Australian governments and businesses would have to spend “enormous” amounts to update their vulnerable outdated technology, taking offline systems that Australians had come to expect would be available all the time. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, recently called for independent assessors to interrogate AI companies’ models and for US government permission for leading AI companies to coordinate without being punished for anti-competitive collusion. Bradshaw called for national security agencies to be involved in the independent interrogation.
The Greens demanded the government legislate mandatory safety testing and transparency obligations for the most developed AI systems on Monday but their motion for debate was rejected by Labor senators. Labor’s Andrew Charlton, the assistant technology minister, told the Sydney Dialogue he took the companies’ warnings seriously but did not want them or the US to be responsible for setting the guardrails around AI. Charlton said the Albanese government would set its forthcoming guidelines for AI companies to cover the range of “extremely dangerous” and more benign possibilities being forecast.
The laws are expected early next year. Anthropic’s chief lawyer, Jeff Bleich, told Monday’s summit the company had been “heartened” by the strong support for its calls and said Australia would need to play a role in setting the rules. One of the factors affecting companies’ interest in Australia has been access to copyright-protected material produced by local creatives so it can train its models.
The industry minister, Tim Ayres, told the summit the government wanted local training but remained unwilling to reduce copyright protections. OpenAI’s vice-president for global policy, Ann O’Leary, said her company was in “regular” and “deep” conversation with the government about the copyright rules but was “very eager to have a bigger and broader relationship”. Andrew Hastie, the Coalition’s industry spokesperson, warned the summit Australia would be vulnerable in future conflicts if it could not get advanced companies to locate themselves in Australia, calling for a formal deal with the US.
The government is already using Claude’s advanced Mythos model. Paul Robards, a data expert at Australia’s department of defence, downplayed the likelihood of Australia developing frontier technology.
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