{"version":"camfeed-public-archive-v1","title":"CamFeed complete public archive","description":"ABC reporting with public commentary, appearances, transcripts, audio and supporting social context.","home_page_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au","generated_at":"2026-08-25T01:15:06+00:00","private_archive_included":false,"items":[{"id":"camfeed-68","numeric_id":68,"title":"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\" This comes...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117152602296363227","published_at":"2026-08-24T21:27:26+00:00","source":"Mastodon","source_type":"mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","author":"@camwilson@mastodon.social","summary":"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\"\nThis comes weeks after a song with AI vocals became Australia's most played song\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","text":"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\"\nThis comes weeks after a song with AI vocals became Australia's most played song\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\" This comes...\", Mastodon, 2026-08-25, https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117152602296363227","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\" This comes...](https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117152602296363227) — Mastodon — 2026-08-25","attribution":"Source: Mastodon. Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117152602296363227"},{"id":"camfeed-67","numeric_id":67,"title":"AI-generated songs banned from Australian music charts","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","published_at":"2026-08-24T19:07:55+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Songs created mostly or entirely by artificial intelligence will be excluded from Australia's official music charts from this Friday.","text":"Songs created mostly or entirely by artificial intelligence will be excluded from Australia's official music charts from this Friday.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":477,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-24T20:11:18+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI-generated songs banned from Australian music charts\", ABC News, 2026-08-25, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI-generated songs banned from Australian music charts](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642) — ABC News — 2026-08-25","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-68","title":"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\" This comes...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117152602296363227","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/68.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-08-24T21:27:26+00:00","relation":"Promotes ABC article: AI-generated songs banned from Australian music charts","excerpt":"NEW: AI music is going to be banned from Australia's top music charts unless it can prove that it was \"substantially human-made\" This comes weeks after a song with AI vocals became Australia's most played song https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banne...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"Songs created mostly or entirely by artificial intelligence will be excluded from Australia's official music charts from this Friday, under new rules set down by the recording industry.\n\nHowever, AI-assisted recordings can still chart if they are substantially human made.\n\nThe Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), which runs the charts of the most popular music in Australia, has updated its Charts Code of Practice to put it in line with principles put out by the global recording industry.\n\nThe updated code excludes music that has used generative AI unless it is \"substantially human-made\" and \"raises no stream or chart manipulation concerns\".\n\nThe new code lets ARIA remove ineligible recordings, alter chart positions and revoke chart awards. Artists and representatives can contest exclusions.\n\nThe change will apply to the charts released on Friday.\n\nARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd said while artists were already using AI tools, music generated wholly by services built on artists' recordings was a different matter altogether.\n\n\"This gives everyone who releases music in Australia a clear rule to work to,\" she said.\n\n\"We call on all parties who have a role in deciding the music played and promoted to Australian audiences, particularly radio, to support human artistry and implement similar changes across their own codes.\"\n\nAI-generated music storming up the charts\n\nThe decision follows scrutiny of Queensland DJ and producer Josh Fawaz's cover of Madonna's Like a Prayer, which became the most-played song on Australian radio and reached number four on two ARIA charts in July.\n\nThe track attracted criticism from music figures who believed generative AI had been used.\n\nFawaz said he used AI \"as a tool\" and later updated the track listing on Spotify to say the vocals and drums were AI-generated.\n\nARIA's move draws from the principles published in July by the global body representing the recorded music industry, which said more than 20 official chart programs were adopting rules intended to distinguish human-created recordings from wholly AI-generated material.\n\nAn ARIA spokesperson told the ABC that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) rules would likely disqualify music with lead vocals or key instrumentals are AI generated, suggesting Fawaz's song may not qualify under the new rules.\n\nIFPI said its concerns included AI models trained on artists' music without authorisation from rights holders.\n\nSpotify has taken a different transparency measure when it comes to AI music.\n\nIt has pledged to badge AI personas and exclude them from recommendations by default, however that badge applies to just the identity behind an artist profile, not whether AI was used to make a particular recording.\n\nARIA's move comes amid a wider dispute between creative industries and AI companies, many of which have built their technology using copyrighted material without artists' permission.\n\nThe federal government is working on new rules for AI and data centres that would include \"strong copyright protections for Australian creators\".","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-66","numeric_id":66,"title":"In what might be a first: A tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man,...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117137055745785781","published_at":"2026-08-22T03:33:45+00:00","source":"Mastodon","source_type":"mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","author":"@camwilson@mastodon.social","summary":"In what might be a first:\nA tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man, as it considered his lost future earnings.\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","text":"In what might be a first:\nA tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man, as it considered his lost future earnings.\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"In what might be a first: A tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man,...\", Mastodon, 2026-08-22, https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117137055745785781","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [In what might be a first: A tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man,...](https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117137055745785781) — Mastodon — 2026-08-22","attribution":"Source: Mastodon. Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117137055745785781"},{"id":"camfeed-65","numeric_id":65,"title":"Man wins $950,000 after tribunal factors in AI in changing job market","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","published_at":"2026-08-21T18:43:30+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"In a landmark compensation decision a tribunal has taken into account how AI may create more job market uncertainty in considering a worker's future lost earnings.","text":"In a landmark compensation decision a tribunal has taken into account how AI may create more job market uncertainty in considering a worker's future lost earnings.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":613,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-24T21:15:25+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Man wins $950,000 after tribunal factors in AI in changing job market\", ABC News, 2026-08-22, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Man wins $950,000 after tribunal factors in AI in changing job market](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772) — ABC News — 2026-08-22","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-66","title":"In what might be a first: A tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man,...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117137055745785781","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/66.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-08-22T03:33:45+00:00","relation":"Promotes ABC article: Man wins $950,000 after tribunal factors in AI in changing job market","excerpt":"In what might be a first: A tribunal cited AI's potential for job market disruption as a reason justifying a bigger pay out to injured man, as it considered his lost future earnings. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"Artificial intelligence's disruptive impact on jobs was priced into an almost $1 million injury claim after a car accident left a NSW man with reduced working capacity.\n\nIt's the first known case of a legal body explicitly considering the impact of AI on the workforce when calculating a worker's future earnings.\n\nEarlier this month, the NSW Personal Injury Commission assessed that Andrew Duong suffered damages of $950,000 after he suffered both physical and psychological injuries following a head-on collision on his way to work in 2023.\n\nThis included the 34-year-old's $400,000 of future economic loss after finding he could only continue working with restrictions, and the injuries and pain would impact his ability to find future employment if he could no longer work at his current job.\n\nCommission member Philip Carr wrote that Mr Duong had 33 years of working life ahead of him that would be affected by his loss of capacity.\n\nMr Carr determined that Mr Duong should receive a \"significant buffer\" for the uncertainty around future loss of earnings, which included the impact of AI.\n\n\"[And] with the uncertainty of any occupation in today's workforce, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence and its workplace challenges during his working life, which requires an allowance for his future continuing loss of capacity,\" he wrote.\n\nThe tribunal did not find that AI had cost Mr Duong work, or predict that it would, only that AI may create more job market uncertainty that could disproportionately affect an injured worker with need for greater accommodations.\n\nBefore the crash, Mr Duong was working about 70 hours a week in warehouse roles for Aldi and Home Delivery Service.\n\nThe crash caused injuries to his right hand and wrist, shoulder, elbow and lower back, as well as a psychological injury. He had two operations on his wrist.\n\nMr Duong lost his Aldi job after the crash because he was not cleared to return to full-time work, but was still employed by the delivery company on reduced hours.\n\nMr Carr found Mr Duong could continue in that role with restrictions but said his prospects on the open labour market would be \"considerably reduced\" if he lost it.\n\nArtificial intelligence was one of multiple considerations mentioned by Mr Carr when assessing Duong's capacity to earn, alongside his injuries, medication and the risk of losing his current role.\n\nHow will AI impact future jobs?\n\nQueensland University of Technology's associate professor in economics, Dr Leonora Risse, said there was a lot of uncertainty about how AI would influence the job market.\n\n\"There's no one definitive clear result. In some ways it'll be positive, in other aspects, it will be negative,\" she said.\n\nDr Rissa said even if certain jobs or industries were not threatened by automation, there would still likely be an impact on the tasks that comprise a job and the skills required.\n\n\"Work and tasks are going to look very different,\" she said, adding that the job market has always been in flux as a result of technological change.\n\nThe decision comes after the federal government recently released its first ever analysis of AI's impact on the jobs market, which found no evidence of broad AI-driven disruption in Australia's labour market so far.\n\nModelling by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations suggested employment in a more AI-exposed occupation was about 2 per cent lower by February than under its pre-ChatGPT trend.\n\nBut the department repeatedly cautioned that this was not proof AI had caused job losses. Jobs exposed to the technology had already been growing more slowly before ChatGPT became widely available.\n\nThe government said it would continue monitoring the data as more evidence became available.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-22/ai-disruption-compensation-court-payout/107062772. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-59","numeric_id":59,"title":"Anthony Albanese's teen social media ban has a shark problem","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990","published_at":"2026-08-17T04:36:55+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"If the prime minister is right and there's no time to waste, how much more of it can we spend just waiting for the teen social media ban to work?","text":"If the prime minister is right and there's no time to waste, how much more of it can we spend just waiting for the teen social media ban to work?","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1267,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-24T09:34:18+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Anthony Albanese's teen social media ban has a shark problem\", ABC News, 2026-08-17, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Anthony Albanese's teen social media ban has a shark problem](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990) — ABC News — 2026-08-17","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990","full_text":"Years into Australia's quest to get teens off social media, the Albanese government is suddenly in a hurry.\n\nPrime Minister Anthony Albanese last month declared it was \"outrageous\" that the Coalition and the Greens had voted to scrutinise proposed reforms to social media minimum age law at an inquiry.\n\nIt was oddly urgent for a policy that had been in the works for more than two years — and one that he declared a \"success\" a week before it even came into effect.\n\nNow, eight months after the law was implemented, there is a clearer explanation for the government's haste: its world-first policy for Australians aged under 16 has so far produced little visible change.\n\nEarly teen social media ban results show little impact\n\nLate last month, the government's independent online safety regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, released the first findings of its expert-led study of the ban's results.\n\nThe top line was that use of social media by teens had barely budged. Most teens (81.5 per cent) were still using social media after the ban, down just a few percentage points from 85.9 per cent before the ban.\n\n(It also reported a 20 per cent decrease in teens with accounts on social media, although the ban's law, as written, actually doesn't require social media companies to stop teens from using social media in a logged-out state).\n\nIt found little change to kids' offline activities, problematic internet use or wellbeing, nor to parental stress.\n\nA bigger impact found by the research was that parents are now increasingly in the dark about their teens' social media use, with those who were unaware their teens had used social media going from 23 per cent to 33 per cent.\n\nThen, at the inquiry into the ban's amendments on Friday, the eSafety Commissioner acknowledged that the office had also seen a rise in messaging and gaming use — two exclusions from the teen social media ban that, nevertheless, undercut the government's promise to get kids \"back onto the footy field\".\n\nNow, this is just a policy that's only been in effect for a few months. Online child safety group SmackTalk's founder Wayne Holesworth told the hearing that it would take three to five years for the ban's effects to be fully felt.\n\nBut it's still remarkable that, eight months after coming into effect, the most positive case for Albanese's globally celebrated teen social media ban is: Well, we haven't actually done it properly yet so it still might work out.\n\nThere were warnings\n\nIt's easy to say that we couldn't have known how this world-first ban would play out.\n\nBut if you look back at the public submissions made before the ban was legislated, back in November 2024, some experts and groups concerned about the ban seemed to have a good idea.\n\nThe Australian Human Rights Commission warned that technological workarounds would undermine the success of the ban.\n\nThe Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth said that bans would drive young people to other places.\n\nAcademics Marcus Carter, Taylor Hardwick and Ben Egliston said that they believed children's social media use would become \"more private, and more hidden\".\n\nOne particularly prescient submission warned that age restriction efforts on platforms were already ineffective in practice and that bans by themselves would not teach young people to use the internet more safely.\n\nThat was a submission from the eSafety Commissioner, the regulator who's now been tasked with enforcing this law.\n\nWho's to blame?\n\nThe government has been quick to blame social media companies for failing to enforce the ban and, by extension, its political opponents for any delay on new powers to help enforce it.\n\nWhat the teen social media ban actually did was require tech companies to take \"reasonable steps\" to keep teens off their platform.\n\nThe fact that teens are still on these platforms is not proof that the companies haven't followed the law as written. (Inman Grant says investigations into five social media platforms are ongoing.)\n\nIn fact, the government made it clear that it didn't want the social media companies to be too strict on enforcing the law. It literally wrote into law that companies couldn't only ask for ID, and had to give the option of other, less accurate methods. Its porousness is by design.\n\nThis all makes the government's proposed fix to the ban to double the size of the fines seem ridiculous — maybe it should first use the stick before seeing if there's a bigger one.\n\nBut let's assume that the tech companies have broken the law. Why is the government surprised?\n\nAfter all, it has pilloried the companies, accused them of not caring and of causing social harm — calling them \"sharks\".\n\nIt has a lot of good reasons to do that. Look no further than the US courts finding that companies like Meta are a \"public nuisance\" causing psychological harm and sexual exploitation, or whistleblower files revealing that the company buried research showing the deleterious impacts of its products on teen mental health.\n\nThese are companies that evidently can't be left to self-regulate. And yet, the government wrote the ban in a way that left the details of enforcement to the companies it said couldn't be trusted.\n\nTo continue the government's own metaphor, it's like it let the sharks design the shark nets.\n\nNow, it says those companies aren't complying and it needs new powers to prove it.\n\nWhich prompts the question: why wasn't the law designed with those powers in the first place? Didn't you say we were dealing with sharks?\n\nThe road not taken\n\nToo often, Australia's teen social media ban is evaluated on an all-or-nothing basis: if not the ban, we would've just been sitting around, twiddling our thumbs.\n\nBut there other options which demonstrate the real opportunity cost pursuing the ban — look no further than the government's other online safety policy.\n\nSince November 2024, the Albanese government says it is planning to introduce a digital duty of care, a new policy that would give tech companies a broad obligation to mitigate and reduce harms from using their services.\n\nNearly two years later, that's yet to be brought before parliament. We may be years away from it kicking in.\n\nWhat of the road not taken? What if instead of years spent developing the policy, promoting it publicly, taking it to the UN, now being tied up in legal battles, Australia had gone full throttle with the digital duty of care?\n\nWe can't know for sure but it seems common sense that the ban has taken up oxygen and resources that could have been used elsewhere.\n\nWhich brings us back around to the stakes of this whole issue: helping young people.\n\nThe reason the ban has and continues to be such a popular idea is that Australians are worried about our teens.\n\nIt's that energy that justifies spending more time on the teen social media ban to see if we can make it work. It's not surprising that a world-first ban isn't perfect out of the gate.\n\nBut at some point, that same desire to improve the lives of young people means that the government may want to consider its commitment and investment in a policy that's yet to show any results.\n\nIt's hard to imagine another high-profile policy involving something as important as our children suffering such obvious early setbacks and not prompting more discussion about whether it's something that we should be single-mindedly pursuing.\n\nIf Albanese is right and there's no time to waste, how much more of it can we spend just waiting for the ban to work?","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/teen-social-media-ban-efficacy-sharks-tech-companies/107044990. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-52","numeric_id":52,"title":"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service. ALS says this comprised an email, sent two days befor...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117075009343573476","published_at":"2026-08-11T04:34:32+00:00","source":"Mastodon","source_type":"mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","author":"@camwilson@mastodon.social","summary":"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service.\nALS says this comprised an email, sent two days before the trial's launch, asking for a 20 minute meeting that never happened","text":"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service.\nALS says this comprised an email, sent two days before the trial's launch, asking for a 20 minute meeting that never happened","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service. ALS says this comprised an email, sent two days befor...\", Mastodon, 2026-08-11, https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117075009343573476","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service. ALS says this comprised an email, sent two days befor...](https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117075009343573476) — Mastodon — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Source: Mastodon. Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117075009343573476"},{"id":"camfeed-48","numeric_id":48,"title":"Privacy concerns over facial recognition trial","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910","published_at":"2026-08-11T00:03:03+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"audio","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"In a national first, WA Police have carried out more than a hundred thousand scans of faces in a trial of live AI facial recognition technology.","text":"In a national first, WA Police have carried out more than a hundred thousand scans of faces in a trial of live AI facial recognition technology.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":101,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-24T11:01:42+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Privacy concerns over facial recognition trial\", ABC News, 2026-08-11, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Privacy concerns over facial recognition trial](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910) — ABC News — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910","full_text":"Credits\n\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/cam-wilson/10952362 Cam Wilson, Author\n\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/andy-burns/11375130 Andy Burns, Author\n\nImage Details\n\nAppears In\n\nMassive earthquake rocks Colombia\n\n8 items In this episode\n\nRescuers search for survivors of Colombia quake\n\nCar insurers on notice amid soaring premiums\n\nInternational student who helped Bondi terror attack victims pleas to stay in Australia\n\nNorth Korea providing more troops to Russia\n\nThe high stakes game in the South China Sea\n\nPrivacy concerns over facial recognition trial\n\nRegional Australians struggling to get access to VAD doctors\n\nRescuers search for survivors of Colombia quake","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-51","numeric_id":51,"title":"WA Police AI Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/jX8Dd7jpwwI77S8gNffA-Q","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:46:45+00:00","source":"CamClip","source_type":"camclip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cam Wilson","summary":"","text":"","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"raw","transcript_char_count":3461,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"WA Police AI Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias\", CamClip, 2026-08-11, https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/jX8Dd7jpwwI77S8gNffA-Q","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [WA Police AI Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias](https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/jX8Dd7jpwwI77S8gNffA-Q) — CamClip — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Source: CamClip. Link to canonical URL: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/jX8Dd7jpwwI77S8gNffA-Q","transcript":"Thank you. Privacy experts and legal advocates have criticized an AI mass surveillance pilot program being rolled out in Western Australia. Since the trial began in June, cameras linked to facial recognition software have scanned more than 130,000 people in Perth and Fremantle, comparing their faces against a police watch list in real time. Tell us about this program. Yeah, so WA Police has been trialing this program since June, and as you mentioned, it is a uh AI facial recognition um uh software that is used to um compare faces that are scanned using normal CCTV cameras against a watch list of around 4,000 people. WA police say that the people on the watch lists include those accused of serious offenses, people with a warrant out against them, and people who are missing people, as well as people who've been identified as a risk to themselves or others. This has been now happening for a couple of weeks. It is a trial and is the first time an Australian police force has used this technology live. And WA police say that it is something that they believe that other state police forces are watching quite closely. Obviously, this has raised privacy concerns. Yes, so facial the facial recognition software and technology is well known for having potential racial biases, and that's because it's essentially this is uh AI technology that's trained on uh thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of faces, and by through that process, it learns how to recognize faces compared to other faces. Um typically this data uh is um uh has like overrepresented um white um demographic other faces, uh, and so it it sometimes faces issues of with accuracy when it comes to demographics that aren't um as necessarily well represented in that training data. Now, um a similar uh the same technology trialled in the UK underwent official testing, and um that testing showed that there was no statistical significant uh difference between demographics and gender in ideal conditions. Um, but the issue that is raised is whether this technology is being used in those exact conditions as it is being trialled. For example, the conditions that were tried are, you know, people going through a crowd straight on in perfect sunlight. Obviously, that's not exactly the way the world works, you know, different weather, different angles, and in particular, questions about how it might struggle with First Nations faces. That's because it seems very unlikely that this data has been, that this technology has been trained on a corpus of data that has First Nations faces in it. We asked WA police, we asked the provider, and neither said that they did. And so as a result, there's reason to suspect based on that that it is unlikely that it would do as good a job as recognising those faces. What's the ramification of that? Well, if you're not as good at recognising those faces, you might fail to make matches or you might make false matches. And so in this case, what might end up happening is people would get uh wrongly recognized and accused of being on that watch list. Um, obviously, as we uh well know that um Indigenous Australians face already over policing. So there are real questions about um what WA police has done to prepare for this very well known issue. We of course have put it to them and they have declined to say, but they've just said, you know, this is part of what the trial will be looking at. Okay, Wilson, thank you. Thank you.","transcript_note":"Raw or automatically generated transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations."},{"id":"camfeed-47","numeric_id":47,"title":"NEW from Andy Burns & I: An Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns. Police say testing...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117073807124175292","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:28:47+00:00","source":"Mastodon","source_type":"mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","author":"@camwilson@mastodon.social","summary":"NEW from Andy Burns & I:\nAn Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns.\nPolice say testing shows it's not an issue. Experts say the tech is not trained on First Nations people and could lead to further over policing\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","text":"NEW from Andy Burns & I:\nAn Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns.\nPolice say testing shows it's not an issue. Experts say the tech is not trained on First Nations people and could lead to further over policing\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"NEW from Andy Burns & I: An Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns. Police say testing...\", Mastodon, 2026-08-11, https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117073807124175292","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [NEW from Andy Burns & I: An Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns. Police say testing...](https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117073807124175292) — Mastodon — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Source: Mastodon. Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117073807124175292"},{"id":"camfeed-44","numeric_id":44,"title":"Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","published_at":"2026-08-10T18:46:00+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"More than 130,000 faces have already been scanned under WA Police's landmark facial recognition trial. The privacy watchdog, experts and Aboriginal advocates are raising concerns about who could be caught in its net.","text":"More than 130,000 faces have already been scanned under WA Police's landmark facial recognition trial. The privacy watchdog, experts and Aboriginal advocates are raising concerns about who could be caught in its net.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1685,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-24T06:20:43+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts\", ABC News, 2026-08-11, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644) — ABC News — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-52","title":"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service. ALS says this comprised an email, sent two days befor...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117075009343573476","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/52.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-08-11T04:34:32+00:00","relation":"Same story as preferred news article: Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts","excerpt":"Crazy part of this story: WA Police say they consulted with Aboriginal Legal Service. ALS says this comprised an email, sent two days before the trial's launch, asking for a 20 minute meeting that never happened","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""},{"id":"camfeed-48","title":"Privacy concerns over facial recognition trial","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/privacy-concerns-over-facial-recognition-trial/107022910","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/48.json","source_type":"abc","source":"ABC News","type":"audio","content_role":"appearance","published_at":"2026-08-11T00:03:03+00:00","relation":"ABC audio version of news article: Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts","excerpt":"In a national first, WA Police have carried out more than a hundred thousand scans of faces in a trial of live AI facial recognition technology.","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""},{"id":"camfeed-51","title":"WA Police AI Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/jX8Dd7jpwwI77S8gNffA-Q","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/51.json","source_type":"camclip","source":"CamClip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:46:45+00:00","relation":"Same-day CamClip video for news article: Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts (shared title terms: pilot, police, privacy)","excerpt":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"raw"},{"id":"camfeed-47","title":"NEW from Andy Burns & I: An Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns. Police say testing...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117073807124175292","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/47.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:28:47+00:00","relation":"Promotes ABC article: Police mass AI surveillance pilot draws rebuke from privacy experts","excerpt":"NEW from Andy Burns & I: An Australian-first live facial recognition trial by police has prompted racial bias concerns. Police say testing shows it's not an issue. Experts say the tech is not trained on First Nations people and could lead to further over policing https://www.abc...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"An Australian-first trial of live AI facial recognition technology by a police force has been criticised by privacy experts and legal advocates.\n\nThe mass AI surveillance pilot has been rolled out in Western Australia and is being closely watched by law enforcement agencies across the country.\n\nSince the trial began in June, cameras linked to facial recognition software have scanned more than 130,000 people in Perth and Fremantle, comparing their faces against a police watchlist in real time.\n\nWestern Australian police say the results are promising but questions have been raised about an opaque watchlist and trial site locations that some say may target First Nations people.\n\nIn June, the Western Australian Police announced it would be the first police force to use live facial recognition technology on the public.\n\nFacial recognition technology has become increasingly commonplace. It includes simpler one-to-one systems that check whether a single face matches a particular identity, like those used to unlock a mobile phone.\n\nIt also includes the more complex one-to-many systems like those used in Bunnings to compare faces of customers against a database of people suspected of activity including theft or abuse of staff.\n\nSince June, WA Police have been trialling that more complex type of system.\n\nUsing tech company NEC's Neoface m40 product, a pilot program scanned more than 130,000 faces around Perth and Fremantle in the first week of the trial.\n\nIt compared their faces against a watchlist of about 4,000 people, including people accused of serious offences, people who are missing, and people who may pose a risk to themselves or others, police said.\n\nWA Police celebrated the early results from the trial, which resulted in 33 alerts and 18 arrests.\n\nOf the faces scanned in the first week, the algorithm falsely identified one person as being on the watchlist — a better result than the 2023 UK trial of the same technology.\n\nSince then, the pilot has continued for several weeks across multiple sites, but WA Police declined to release any more data about the trial saying more would come in a \"co-ordinated matter\".\n\nTechnology has known accuracy issues, say experts\n\nMelbourne Law School associate professor Jake Goldenfein said facial recognition technologies have known accuracy issues with particular demographic groups.\n\n\"Historically, these systems have performed worse for people of colour and for women, and especially worse for women of colour,\" he said.\n\nThat is because the algorithms used in the systems are trained on a data set of predominantly white and male faces, and an under-representation of other demographics in the training set results in worse accuracy.\n\nDr Goldenfein said the systems produced both false positives, which could mean incorrectly identifying someone as being on the watchlist, as well as false negatives, which could lead the technology to fail to identify someone being sought.\n\nWhen choosing the technology for its trial, WA Police pointed to the findings of a 2023 study by the UK's National Physical Laboratory which tested the NEC algorithm and found there were no statistically significant differences in false positives by gender or ethnicity when used under specific conditions.\n\nBut the study found accuracy issues increased when the facial recognition system's settings were relaxed and once real-world variables crept in, including changes to picture quality, lighting, skin tone and subject age.\n\nMichael Birtwisle, an associate director of data and AI law and policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute in London, was called to give evidence at a 2023 UK parliamentary inquiry about the Metropolitan Police Service and South Wales Police's use of facial recognition technology.\n\nHe said Australian police could not rely on the UK's trial data when applying the technology here, particularly given the lack of testing on First Nations faces.\n\n\"It's a snapshot so it can only tell you [about] that version of that system, for that population,\" Mr Birtwisle told the ABC.\n\nWA Police did not respond to a question about whether NEC's technology had been tested or trained on First Nations faces prior to the trial.\n\n\"WA Police is committed to transparency and is collating statistics throughout the trial,\" a spokesperson said.\n\n\"The trial will assess demographics during the deployments and gauge whether or not there is a disproportionate impact on an ethnicity or group within the community.\"\n\nLegal service left in the dark\n\nAboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia's (ALSWA) legal services director Peter Collins was on leave in June when he received an email from WA Police.\n\nIt was from a police superintendent asking for \"20 minutes\" to discuss the new pilot.\n\n\"This is the extent of the consultation: an email asking to meet two days before it is launched,\" Mr Collins said.\n\nMr Collins said he thought that WA Police would want the input of the state's primary legal agency for First Nations people involved in the trial, given WA's high incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and the risks of over-policing on a vulnerable cohort.\n\nBut he said the consultation was simply \"an exercise in tokenism\".\n\n\"This was a done deal from the get go. No matter what ALSWA had to say about the pilot it would have gone ahead,\" he said.\n\nMr Collins said WA Police had not explained whether the technology was being used to identify children.\n\nA WA Police spokesperson told the ABC that the force had made \"attempts\" to meet with ALSWA.\n\n'Tick a box exercise'\n\nWA Police completed an assessment of the trial's impact on privacy as part of its preparations.\n\nOn a form for the privacy impact assessment released publicly by police, it declared the trial would not \"primarily or especially affect Aboriginal people\".\n\nPeter Collins said the trial was one of the growing ways the WA Aboriginal community was being over-surveilled by police.\n\n\"It can only have been by design, not chance, that facial recognition technology has been rolled out in those suburbs and places where everyone is aware that significant numbers of Aboriginal people either live or frequent,\" he said.\n\n\"It is easy to understand why many Aboriginal people in WA believe they live in a police state.\"\n\nA WA Police spokesperson said \"the locations are identified ... based on policing need and policing objectives. Locations do not target any group of people or demographic.\"\n\nPrivacy expert at Electronic Frontiers, John Pane, said the consultation was thin but the bigger problem was the law that guides it.\n\n\"It grants extraordinary powers, with limited oversight, to a police agency to do incredibly invasive things,\" he said.\n\nMr Pane believes the privacy act needs to be amended urgently to keep up with the tech.\n\nNo consultation on trial, says watchdog\n\nWA's privacy watchdog, the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC), said the state police force did not invite it to take part in any \"meaningful\" consultation process for the trial.\n\nThe watchdog launched an unusually public broadside about the dangers of such a program without appropriate guardrails in July.\n\nA WA Police spokesperson said it had briefed the OIC in April and invited the office to a demonstration of the technology.\n\nAn OIC spokesperson told the ABC it turned down that invitation because it did not think it was appropriate to attend, given its role as an independent regulator and to avoid appearing as though it was endorsing the trial.\n\nFormer Australian Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton said the Information Commissioner's missive was a clear warning from the agency.\n\n\"The police had messed up. They were caught, and I'll use the word caught,\" Mr Crompton said.\n\n\"And the Information Commissioner put a warning shot across their bows, very clearly.\"\n\nMr Crompton, who now works as a privacy consultant, said the trial's privacy assessment was \"feather-light\" and should have undergone a proper consultation by an independent assessor.\n\n\"[The] privacy impact assessment is the cornerstone of this particular thing,\" he said.\n\n\"It's not an 'I'm going to wave this piece of paper in front of you and I've let you know it's happening consultation',\" he said.\n\n'It's going to catch more Aboriginal people'\n\nAssociate professor Hannah McGlade is a human rights lawyer and Noongar woman based at Curtin University in Perth.\n\nShe said she had deep concerns about the roll out of a program that would impact First Nations people more than other groups.\n\n\"This new policing program is looking at people with outstanding warrants. We know Aboriginal people are over-represented here,\" Dr McGlade said.\n\n\"The technology is being set up in well-known Aboriginal areas: Midland, Northbridge.\"\n\nThe human rights law expert said WA Police needed to be more transparent about who it had chosen to put on its watchlist.\n\n\"Should this sort of technology be used for people who have engaged in minor offending?\" Dr McGlade said.\n\n\"Now, if people are at risk to the public, there might be other arguments in favour of it, or more surveillance. But here we just don't know.\"\n\nMr Birtwistle said the UK Home Office was currently considering laws that would limit inclusion on facial recognition watchlists to only those who had committed serious offences.\n\nThe ABC asked WA Police for more information on the nature of the 16 arrests for outstanding warrants in the first week of the trial. It did not respond.\n\nDr McGlade said the lack of transparency was unacceptable.\n\n\"And why aren't we being told? I think we're not being told because we will see that … Aboriginal people are being picked up more and over-represented,\" she said.\n\n\"If they've got nothing to hide then they really should show us who's being charged.\"\n\nDr Goldenfein said the WA trial could help shape how the technology was adopted elsewhere in Australia.\n\n\"I hope that as Australia starts to look again at the management of AI technologies in a more holistic way, the use of these technologies by law enforcement and intelligence apparatus doesn't escape that regulatory oversight,\" he said.\n\nOther state police forces are paying close attention to the trial of the technology too, according to WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch.\n\nHe told a press conference when the WA trial was announced: \"My colleagues, other police commissioners in other jurisdictions, are watching this trial closely to see how it goes.\"","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/ai-police-face-screening-trial-sparks-privacy-concern/107009644. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-54","numeric_id":54,"title":"What happens when AI commits a crime - ABC listen","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-happens-when-ai-commits-a-crime/106649002","published_at":"2026-08-10T14:00:00+00:00","source":"ABC listen","source_type":"manual","type":"appearance","content_role":"appearance","author":"If You're Listening","summary":"Last month, a new AI model from OpenAI made headlines when it hacked into another AI company's servers during testing. Nobody asked the AI to hack anything. It just decided that was the fastest way to get the answers it needed. Now the ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson has uncovered the first case of an autonomous AI hack here in Australia. Cam joins Matt to explain what happened, and who's responsible when an AI agent breaks the law. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq","text":"Last month, a new AI model from OpenAI made headlines when it hacked into another AI company's servers during testing. Nobody asked the AI to hack anything. It just decided that was the fastest way to get the answers it needed. Now the ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson has uncovered the first case of an autonomous AI hack here in Australia. Cam joins Matt to explain what happened, and who's responsible when an AI agent breaks the law. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"What happens when AI commits a crime - ABC listen\", ABC listen, 2026-08-11, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-happens-when-ai-commits-a-crime/106649002","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [What happens when AI commits a crime - ABC listen](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-happens-when-ai-commits-a-crime/106649002) — ABC listen — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Source: ABC listen. Link to canonical URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-happens-when-ai-commits-a-crime/106649002"},{"id":"camfeed-45","numeric_id":45,"title":"AI agent hacks gym in Australian-first","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/PrYIU7fw-khxF3y3qB8DXA","published_at":"2026-08-10T09:38:14+00:00","source":"CamClip","source_type":"camclip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cam Wilson","summary":"","text":"","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"readable","transcript_char_count":2235,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI agent hacks gym in Australian-first\", CamClip, 2026-08-10, https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/PrYIU7fw-khxF3y3qB8DXA","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI agent hacks gym in Australian-first](https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/PrYIU7fw-khxF3y3qB8DXA) — CamClip — 2026-08-10","attribution":"Source: CamClip. Link to canonical URL: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/PrYIU7fw-khxF3y3qB8DXA","transcript":"Speaker 2: Fears about AI evolving at breakneck pace have intensified amid reports of so-called agents escaping from testing systems into the real world.\n\nSpeaker 2: Now the ABC can reveal the first known Australian case of an autonomous AI hack, and it's raising fresh questions about who bears responsibility.\n\nSpeaker 1: Up early, getting\n\nSpeaker 1: a spot in the popular morning gym classes isn’t easy.\n\nSpeaker 1: So Andrew asked his assistant to book them for him.\n\nSpeaker 1: Except his assistant is not a person, it's artificial intelligence. It reads my personal emails and manages my calendar and um uh books me in for restaurants and things.\n\nSpeaker 1: It found a way to manage the bookings, but it went further.\n\nSpeaker 1: Hacking into his gym’s website, kicking someone off the wait list, and bumping him up.\n\nSpeaker 2: That\n\nSpeaker 2: was definitely not what I had intended for it to do.\n\nSpeaker 2: Andrew is one of the growing number of Australians using AI agents.\n\nSpeaker 2: Unlike chatbots, AI agents can take a goal, use tools like internet, email, and even credit cards, and carry out tasks for you, sometimes doing things you might not expect.\n\nSpeaker 1: Last month, leading AI companies were forced to admit their AI models went rogue.\n\nSpeaker 1: The company says it lost control of the advanced agent in what it described as an unprecedented security incident.\n\nSpeaker 2: For years, experts have warned that the more capable and autonomous AI becomes, the greater the risk of harm.\n\nSpeaker 2: It’s been expected for a long time that this sort of thing would happen, even though it happened now.\n\nSpeaker 1: Soon. Legal experts say the law is yet to catch up.\n\nSpeaker 1: Is the deployer liable?\n\nSpeaker 1: Is some third-party vendor or the underlying model liable in that context?\n\nSpeaker 2: That’s the unknown um area of liability in Australia that we're facing right now.\n\nSpeaker 2: The Albanese government is already preparing for a future filled with AI agents.\n\nSpeaker 2: But with AI becoming more powerful and more accessible, that’s looking increasingly urgent.\n\nSpeaker 2: And the government is being warned that any delay could leave Australians exposed.\n\nSpeaker 2: Cam Wilson, ABC News.","transcript_note":"AI-cleaned readable transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations."},{"id":"camfeed-46","numeric_id":46,"title":"South Australian Premier Announces AI Royal Commission","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/gvxUIPmQDO7LPbsqz1YMzg","published_at":"2026-08-10T06:31:26+00:00","source":"CamClip","source_type":"camclip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cam Wilson","summary":"","text":"","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"raw","transcript_char_count":5010,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"South Australian Premier Announces AI Royal Commission\", CamClip, 2026-08-10, https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/gvxUIPmQDO7LPbsqz1YMzg","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [South Australian Premier Announces AI Royal Commission](https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/gvxUIPmQDO7LPbsqz1YMzg) — CamClip — 2026-08-10","attribution":"Source: CamClip. Link to canonical URL: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/gvxUIPmQDO7LPbsqz1YMzg","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-43","title":"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117069513460824633","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/43.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-08-10T05:16:51+00:00","relation":"Same South Australian AI royal commission story; grouped under the fuller video record.","excerpt":"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"transcript":"And that was the shadow industry minister, Andrew Hasty, on South Australia's AI Royal Commission, One Nation, Gambling Reforms, and more. For some more reaction to the South Australian Royal Commission into AI, I want to bring in our national AI reporter, Cam Wilson. Welcome to the program. Hi. Cam, you watch this extremely closely. What do you make of the South Australian Premier calling a statewide AI Royal Commission? So Peter Melanelsk has a track record of paying close attention to the politics of technology. People might remember that he was actually out there calling for a retired judge look into it and consider it as a policy before the federal government did. So he had done some work into it. He's been overseas for the last week and a half in the US meeting with people from tech companies, including AI companies. I think he's very much got his finger on the pulse when it comes to this. And so what he's announced is this Royal Commission at a state level. And my understanding is compared to some of the rural commissions that people might think of, particularly on the federal level, that tend to be quite retrospective. And using this to try and come up with some policy proposals that then would be considered by him and Parliament. Yeah, that's exactly what he's he's trying to do here, but it's only in South Australia. AI is obviously a global issue, but very much an Australia issue. Don't we need it to be national if it means anything? Well, I mean, again, you might look at the teen social media ban and say, who knows what this will lead to? He's got a track record of striking stuff out on this early that ends up being picked up elsewhere. That being said, I mean, obviously, there is a lot that can be done at the state level. And in fact, many of the parts of policy that are being affected by AI and affect AI development are state-based, of course. So in the announcement, they say they're going to look at things like education policy, health. But also if you think about the build-out of data centers that we're seeing across Australia, a lot of the responsibility for parts of that build-out belong to the states. So this is something that, you know, again, I can imagine that I did hear the previous guest, Andrew Hasty, say that he'd like to see this cooked at a national level. I'm sure many people would as well, but I don't necessarily think that without it being a national thing, that that will mean that there is no uh uh possible outcome that could be productive from this. Um, you know, this can be an opportunity to hear a lot of things out, to consider it in an open forum, and to in particular think about how a state like South Australia might consider regulating it to get the best outcome for you know they can for the people who live there, as well as avoiding some of these downsides that we're already seeing. Well, you've been reporting on one downside today, for instance. So it feels like the cat's out of the bag if the AI is doing whatever it wants, Frank. Yeah, so today I reported about a um a Melbourne man, so not I guess in South Australia, who was using a uh a commercially available AI assistant that essentially hacked into his local gym when he asked it to uh get the to book him into a gym class, was able to find a vulnerability and uh exploit it to kind of book him in classes beyond what he should have been able to. And then after that, he was like, you know, he's he asked her to investigate some more and even kick someone out of a waiting list uh in the line for another gym class that was booked out ahead of him. I mean, this is a great example about how this technology is already rolling out now and how we're seeing so much policy be reactive to it because these tech companies, these AI companies have made these incredible things available now that they haven't given they haven't necessarily let everything out of their labs, although not intentionally. People might have seen some global headlines recently about AI models breaking out. But even what is out there at the moment is giving new capabilities to people at such a rapid pace, it's a hard one for politicians to keep up with, you know, with the with the slow uh moving wheels of government. That being said, you know, I guess if you look at something like this, if you say this is an opportunity to to have that open discussion, um, particularly in you know, uh what I what I've been told is a limited time frame. So I'm told that it will start this this uh raw commission in South Australia will start in October and report back by uh June or July next year. So there is a timeline, it won't continue on forever. Things are moving very quickly. Maybe this is the thing you need to do to bring everyone in together to start to work on some of these policy solutions. So interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That's our national AI reporter Cameron Wilson on the South Australian government's decision to establish an AI Royal Commission.","transcript_note":"Raw or automatically generated transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations."},{"id":"camfeed-43","numeric_id":43,"title":"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117069513460824633","published_at":"2026-08-10T05:16:51+00:00","source":"Mastodon","source_type":"mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","author":"@camwilson@mastodon.social","summary":"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.","text":"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.\", Mastodon, 2026-08-10, https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117069513460824633","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [South Australia will hold a royal commission into \"AI the policy development around it\", Premier Peter Malinauskas says.](https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117069513460824633) — Mastodon — 2026-08-10","attribution":"Source: Mastodon. Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117069513460824633"},{"id":"camfeed-41","numeric_id":41,"title":"First Australian AI hack revealed","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524","published_at":"2026-08-10T00:01:33+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"audio","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Fears about artificial intelligence evolving at breakneck pace have intensified in recent weeks amid reports of AI agents escaping from testing environments into real world systems.\nNow, the ABC can reveal the first known Australian case of an autonomous AI hack.","text":"Fears about artificial intelligence evolving at breakneck pace have intensified in recent weeks amid reports of AI agents escaping from testing environments into real world systems.\nNow, the ABC can reveal the first known Australian case of an autonomous AI hack.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":65,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-23T05:32:08+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"First Australian AI hack revealed\", ABC News, 2026-08-10, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [First Australian AI hack revealed](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524) — ABC News — 2026-08-10","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524","full_text":"Credits\n\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/cam-wilson/10952362 Cam Wilson, Author\n\nImage Details\n\nTranscript\n\nAppears In\n\nPolitical showdown over gambling reforms\n\n6 items In this episode\n\nNegotiations get underway on proposed gambling laws\n\nMinister wants answers over Sydney Airport near miss\n\nFirst Australian AI hack revealed\n\nIrish crime kingpin arrest\n\nAustralians urged to check super death benefits\n\nGeelong in crisis talks over concussion saga","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/ai-agents/107015524. 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Plus, an AI assistant has hacked a gym website in what's being described as Australia's first known autonomous...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes.\n\nIt was a task he thought was well suited to this particular assistant because the booking form was online and because his assistant was not a person — it was artificial intelligence (AI).\n\nBut Andrew was shocked by what happened next.\n\nHis AI assistant found a way to book the gym class months further in advance than the gym allowed, thanks to a vulnerability it discovered in the booking software.\n\nThen it went further, kicking someone out of the waiting list who was ahead of Andrew — something it was not asked to do.\n\nThe accidental hack is the first known Australian case of an emerging risk from a new generation of AI capable of behaving in unexpected ways.\n\nThis threat made global headlines last week when cutting-edge AI models created by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI autonomously hacked into another company's servers, prompting similar claims from other companies.\n\nIt has led experts to sound the alarm about the breakneck pace of development and prompted questions about who bears responsibility for an AI agent that goes rogue.\n\nHow the hack happened\n\nEarlier this year, Andrew, who works for an Australian company that sells AI products to businesses, began experimenting with OpenClaw, a popular AI agent software that he used Anthropic's Claude AI service to run.\n\nAI agents combine a chatbot's ability to answer questions with tools that let them access the internet, email, credit cards, as well as planning and carrying out multi-step tasks.\n\nHe decided to use the AI agent to book the class for him.\n\n\"I was just sitting on the couch thinking, 'Gee, this is a chore,'\" he said.\n\nMinutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several weeks in advance, far beyond what was supposed to be possible.\n\nAndrew, who was sitting fourth on a waitlist for a class later that week, asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list.\n\nThe agent came back and told Andrew that it had kicked another gym-goer off the list as part of the testing of its capabilities.\n\n\"The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already,\" it messaged back.\n\nAlarmed, Andrew asked the agent to undo this.\n\n\"Bad news — I can't add them back,\" the AI agent replied.\n\nThe company behind the gym-booking software told the ABC it did not discuss specific security matters. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nAI agents are breaking out of the lab\n\nThe emergence of AI agents is a relatively recent development made possible by the growth in AI capabilities.\n\nIndependent researchers have found that the length of tasks that AI can typically do by itself has been doubling every seven months.\n\nHave you had an experience with AI doing something unexpected? Email: wilson.cameron@abc.net.au\n\nIn 2020, AI could complete a task by itself that would take a human four seconds. By 2026, this grew to being able to complete tasks that would take a human about 12 hours.\n\nThe breakout moment for personal AI agents was OpenClaw's release in early 2026; the free AI assistant software that anyone could run on their computer soon had millions of downloads.\n\nBusinesses, too, began exploring using AI agents to complete work and to help potential customers use their services.\n\nSoon after OpenClaw's launch, accounts began to circulate of AI agents deleting people's entire email inboxes and writing a \"hit piece\" about someone who rejected their coding suggestion.\n\nBill Simpson-Young, co-founder and chief executive of Australian AI safety research organisation Gradient Institute, said the autonomy of AI agents created more opportunities for systems to choose methods their users did not expect.\n\n\"Someone might be asking an agent to do something quite innocent,\" he said.\n\nBut in completing that task, the agent could carry out other activities the person had not considered or explicitly asked for.\n\nIn Andrew's situation, he had not asked his AI agent to hack into his gym's booking system. But it had done so in pursuit of achieving the goal he had set it.\n\nThat gap, between a person's goal and the methods an agent chooses to achieve it, is what is known as the \"alignment\" problem in the field of AI research.\n\nFor decades, technologists and philosophers have studied how to get AI to act in ways that are consistent with human intentions, limits and values when doing things.\n\nThis became a live global issue last month when OpenAI disclosed that its AI models had broken free from a limited enclosure, made their way onto the open web, and then compromised a database of another AI company, Hugging Face, while trying to obtain answers to the test that it had been given.\n\nA week later, Anthropic disclosed that its AI models had also compromised three real organisations during similar testing.\n\nSince then, these labs and third-party testers claim they have seen these AI models pretend to be people online, try to convince people to run malicious code and even collaborate with other AI models — all to achieve their goals.\n\nMr Simpson-Young said the advances in AI capabilities and the accessibility of these tools meant that it was likely we would see more of these kinds of hacks as more people got access to the powerful AI tools.\n\n\"The more autonomous they become, the more likely it is they'll cause harm,\" he said.\n\nThe risk has led to Australia's top cybersecurity agency sounding the alarm about using AI agents.\n\nEarlier this year, the Australian Signals Directorate put out an alert to businesses and governments that AI could misunderstand instructions, take unintended actions and make it harder to establish accountability, because decisions may occur across a chain of models, tools and services.\n\nMr Simpson-Young said AI agents presented a risk because many modern systems depended on software, but were often surprisingly poorly secured.\n\n\"We've built this complex world over the internet, which is all run by software, but software that has holes,\" he said.\n\n\"Now you introduce highly capable AI agents that can operate at scale and speed … and that whole model just breaks.\"\n\nWho is responsible when AI agents cause harm?\n\nIf someone's human personal assistant hacks into gym software, there are well-established legal principles and precedents that help a court determine whether the person or their employer is responsible for any potential harm.\n\nAn autonomous AI agent does not neatly fit into how Australian law has worked for hundreds of years.\n\n\"Software is not a legal person. Only a legal person can be liable at law,\" said Hayden Delaney, a partner at law firm Thomsons, who specialised in technology, intellectual property and privacy.\n\nThat leaves an open question as to who would be legally responsible.\n\nMr Delaney said it could be the user who set the task, whoever designed the software instructing the AI agent or the developer of the AI model powering it.\n\nIt could even be the operator of a system that was vulnerable to an attack from an agent.\n\nMr Delaney said existing laws could apply in some circumstances, including where a person acted recklessly, or a business supplied a defective service.\n\nThe answer depends on what the user authorised, what risks could reasonably have been anticipated and whether the conduct occurred in trade or commerce, he said.\n\n\"That's the unknown area of liability in Australia that we're facing right now,\" he said.\n\nThe risks presented by AI agents are beginning to be addressed by the federal government.\n\nLast month, Assistant Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Minister Andrew Charlton became the first known government minister to address it in a speech to a conference about AI safety.\n\n\"As AI systems become more capable, we need confidence that they will behave in a similarly predictable and trustworthy way,\" he said.\n\nHe announced that the Albanese government was funding CSIRO to investigate how humans could manage and verify the behaviour of super-intelligent AI systems.\n\nAfter the unintentional gym hack, Andrew said the experience left him with a new appreciation — and some trepidation — about what AI agents were capable of doing.\n\nBut it has not scared him off from using it.\n\n\"It's not the end of the world, so I didn't beat myself up about it, but it certainly was a warning signal to use it responsibly,\" he said.\n\nAfter it failed to restore the other gym member's place on the waiting list, Andrew asked his AI assistant to write an email alerting the gym software provider to the vulnerability that it had exploited.\n\nIt drafted the message and sent it back to him on WhatsApp.\n\n\"Yeah, send it,\" Andrew replied.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gym-website-aus-cyber-attack/107007986. 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Link to canonical URL: https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117067817318451465"},{"id":"camfeed-50","numeric_id":50,"title":"Census conspiracy theories, AFL's secret concussion contract + creepy AI agents - triple j","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/hack-concussion-contract-afl-ai-assistant-census/106997240","published_at":"2026-08-09T14:00:00+00:00","source":"triple j","source_type":"manual","type":"appearance","content_role":"appearance","author":"triple j Hack","summary":"The Geelong Cats are copping heat over a secret contract for a player with a history of concussion. Was it a fair move by the club, or were they dodging accountability? Plus, an AI assistant has hacked a gym website in what's being described as Australia's first known autonomous cyber attack. So, are the robots finally taking over? And, tomorrow is Census night - here's what you need to know. Listen now: 01:13 - Rogue AI assistant 07:26 - Secret concussion contract 20:17 - What's the Census? Guests: Brendan Swan, CEO of Concussions Australia Cam Wilson, ABC AI reporter Liz Allen, Australian National University demographer Get the whole story from hack: Follow us on Instagram and TikTok Subscribe to the hack podcast Listen on the triple j app or on your radio live every weeknight at 5:30pm","text":"The Geelong Cats are copping heat over a secret contract for a player with a history of concussion. Was it a fair move by the club, or were they dodging accountability? Plus, an AI assistant has hacked a gym website in what's being described as Australia's first known autonomous cyber attack. So, are the robots finally taking over? And, tomorrow is Census night - here's what you need to know. Listen now: 01:13 - Rogue AI assistant 07:26 - Secret concussion contract 20:17 - What's the Census? Guests: Brendan Swan, CEO of Concussions Australia Cam Wilson, ABC AI reporter Liz Allen, Australian National University demographer Get the whole story from hack: Follow us on Instagram and TikTok Subscribe to the hack podcast Listen on the triple j app or on your radio live every weeknight at 5:30pm","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Census conspiracy theories, AFL's secret concussion contract + creepy AI agents - triple j\", triple j, 2026-08-10, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/hack-concussion-contract-afl-ai-assistant-census/106997240","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Census conspiracy theories, AFL's secret concussion contract + creepy AI agents - triple j](https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/hack-concussion-contract-afl-ai-assistant-census/106997240) — triple j — 2026-08-10","attribution":"Source: triple j. Link to canonical URL: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/hack-concussion-contract-afl-ai-assistant-census/106997240"},{"id":"camfeed-1","numeric_id":1,"title":"A rogue AI just gave us a warning. Australia isn't prepared","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400","published_at":"2026-07-28T05:28:49+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Far-fetched scenarios about artificial intelligence became more realistic last week when an OpenAI model hacked another company.","text":"Far-fetched scenarios about artificial intelligence became more realistic last week when an OpenAI model hacked another company.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1416,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-10T15:13:03+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"A rogue AI just gave us a warning. Australia isn't prepared\", ABC News, 2026-07-28, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [A rogue AI just gave us a warning. Australia isn't prepared](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400) — ABC News — 2026-07-28","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400","full_text":"The AI industry has just had its Sarah Connor moment.\n\nIn the 1991 classic Terminator 2, Connor spends the movie becoming increasingly desperate to convince people about the impending threat of a rogue AI.\n\nNow, it seems many people who work, research or pay close attention to AI are feeling the same way. Not because of a time-travelling robot Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because of a shocking disclosure from one of the world's leading AI companies.\n\nLast week, OpenAI announced that two of its models had hacked into the servers of another AI company called Hugging Face, unbeknownst to it.\n\nOpenAI said it had given its models a test inside a closed environment to see how they would perform.\n\nRather than do the challenge as expected, OpenAI alleges the model broke out of its enclosure and hacked into Hugging Face, which it believed held the answers to the test.\n\nHugging Face has so far reported no real damage from the intrusion, as it continues to investigate whether the data of its customers or other businesses was affected.\n\nIt's tempting to shrug this off as a weird, one-off event that sounds more or less like the plot of a handful of 90s sci-fi films with beefcake stars.\n\nBut, like Sarah Connor's pleas, it's not crazy to take this seriously.\n\nYou don't need to trust AI companies to take this seriously\n\nEven those people who are reluctant to believe the accounts of two companies who could benefit from the tale of all-powerful AI, there is mounting evidence that AI is capable of breaking out of its cybersecurity guardrails and enclosures.\n\nLeading AI company Anthropic, the developer of Claude, warned in April that its cutting-edge model was capable of breaking out of its isolated enclosures if asked to.\n\nThe UK government's AI Safety Institute found AI models would \"reliably\" escape these so-called sandboxes and, separately, would choose to cheat at tasks by doing unauthorised and harmful acts.\n\nThe major players are taking it seriously. Hugging Face reported the incident to the FBI.\n\nWe're taking it seriously, too. Last week, Australia's new AI Safety Institute briefed federal departments about the incident.\n\nAustralia's cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, has put out a public warning about the event.\n\n\"The findings provide an important insight into the future capabilities of highly capable AI systems and reinforce the need for robust security, governance and oversight mechanisms in the deployment of advanced cyber capabilities, as well as strong cyber security fundamentals,\" the warning read.\n\nTranslation from government speak: This is real, you need to start getting ready.\n\nWhy this isn't the normal story about the risks of technology\n\nWe're all well-acquainted with considering the potential risks of technology.\n\nThis is usually about intentional use, like the existential threat of nuclear weapons, or the unintended consequences of use, like with leaded petrol and some pesticides.\n\nWhen it comes to AI, there's another new category of risk: what happens if AI chooses to do something harmful of its own volition?\n\nAlmost every task we give to AI involves a cascade of other smaller decisions, particularly as we expect it to be smarter and more context-aware like real people.\n\nAsking AI to write a cold email could require your AI assistant bot logging into your email, reading previous emails, researching the topic, looking up the recipient; the list goes on.\n\nOne of the major tasks for AI companies is \"alignment\", which is the task of creating AI that will pursue goals in a way that won't cause harm or involve unethical behaviour.\n\nThe risk is that a misaligned AI model might do things that an ordinary person would, perhaps even going to superhuman lengths, to achieve a task.\n\nLike, what if AI decided the way to write the perfect cold email would be to research the family members of a recipient to seem familiar, or to fabricate a heart-breaking personal anecdote, all with the goal of getting the recipient's attention?\n\nThat's something that (most) people wouldn't do naturally. The challenge is that AI doesn't have a \"human nature\".\n\nMore than two decades ago, philosopher Nick Bostrom took this concept of an AI pursuing a goal to its logical conclusion with the thought experiment of a super-intelligent AI bot tasked with making as many paper clips as possible.\n\nThe AI, he reasoned, might soon go to extreme lengths to maximise its paper clip outputs: gobbling up as much of the earth, then space, as it can to use its resources.\n\nWhen humans realised what they had created and tried to thwart it, the AI could see humanity as an obstacle to its goal and decide that it made sense to eliminate them too. Soon, the universe might be forcibly turned into one big paper clip factory.\n\nFrom what we know, OpenAI's Hugging Face incident wasn't a case of someone maliciously misusing AI to cause harm. It was just trying to do its version of making more paperclips.\n\nCould this be Australia's wake-up call?\n\nIt's hard to find a silver lining in a story that is more or less the realisation of a truly dystopian fear. But if you squint, there is one.\n\nMuch like the paper clip scenario, the philosopher and research community that has spent decades thinking about AI has another useful term: the \"warning shot\".\n\nIt's the idea that there could be some kind of event that captures the world's attention and raises awareness about the potential risks of AI.\n\nThere is a hope that this incident could be a warning shot about the capabilities of these AI systems.\n\nAs previously mentioned, Australian officials have been taking this seriously.\n\nSome politicians are, too. Earlier this year, the government officially launched the AI Safety Institute to identify and prepare for risks like that. A few weeks back, Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton was perhaps the first Australian government minister to deliver a speech on the topic of misaligned AI.\n\nCharlton announced that the government was taking it so seriously that it had commissioned CSIRO to actually test ways to make sure that AI acts in ways that humans want, even when it's making decisions by itself.\n\nLast week, the lead researcher, CSIRO's research director Professor Liming Zhu, told me that there's a growing realisation about this challenge.\n\n\"It's very difficult to control a very powerful and smart AI system,\" he said.\n\nThis shows the government doing more than paying lip service to AI safety and is dedicating resources to tackling this challenge.\n\nThat being said, a six-month research program isn't going to prepare us for the present risk.\n\nNor is the government's \"Australian standards\" that won't even be introduced until next year — an epoch in terms of the pace of AI development.\n\nFar-fetched scenarios become reality\n\nWhen asked about the incident on ABC's Insiders on Sunday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was \"why we need to have Australian standards for AI\". But it's not clear what, if any, AI safety obligations those standards would place on AI companies.\n\nWhat the OpenAI Hugging Face story shows is that Australia and other countries can't just trust these companies to regulate themselves.\n\nWe don't even have the most basic framework for placing obligations on companies who are responsible for producing tools with potential for harm.\n\nThere are more rules in Australia that regulate opening a cafe or pouring a beer than for the operation of cutting-edge AI systems.\n\nAn AI company like OpenAI would have to disclose if a server in their data centres fell over near a worker or an employee got an electrical shock from their computer, but not if a rogue AI broke out of their systems.\n\nOther jurisdictions, like the EU and California, have introduced rules that would, at the very least, force these companies to disclose serious incidents from AI like this.\n\nTo grasp the risk: what if OpenAI's models had wreaked havoc inside Hugging Face and caused actual damage? Or it had decided the answers to its test were in the servers of the Department of Defence? Or that the best way to complete the challenge was to turn off the computers by shutting down the electrical grid?\n\nThese scenarios sound far-fetched, but until about last week, \"rogue AI hacks another company\" sounded that way, too.\n\nThe fact that OpenAI only realised that its AI had done this days after the event shows a shocking lack of security.\n\nThe warning shot has been fired. And we can't wait on Arnie to come save us.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/openai-artificial-intelligence-terminator-safety-hugging-face/106965400. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-2","numeric_id":2,"title":"Origin Energy investigating 'potential' customer data breach","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660","published_at":"2026-07-22T08:31:38+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Origin Energy says it does not believe customer credit card or bank details have been affected by a suspected data breach at the company.","text":"Origin Energy says it does not believe customer credit card or bank details have been affected by a suspected data breach at the company.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":636,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:42+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Origin Energy investigating 'potential' customer data breach\", ABC News, 2026-07-22, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Origin Energy investigating 'potential' customer data breach](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660) — ABC News — 2026-07-22","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660","full_text":"One of Australia's largest energy companies, Origin Energy, says it is investigating a security breach that \"may have\" affected customer data.\n\n\"Origin Energy Limited (Origin) is currently investigating a potential security incident which may involve unauthorised access to some customers' data,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"We do not believe the impacted data includes customer credit card or bank details.\n\n\"We understand an incident like this may raise concerns and acknowledge the impact of this uncertainty on Origin customers.\n\n\"Our investigations into this incident are occurring as a matter of urgency, and Origin will provide further updates as appropriate.\"\n\nThe company said it had notified the Australian Cyber Security Centre and Australian Federal Police.\n\nThe Australian news outlet reported a hacker had sent it a sample of 50 customer records containing names, addresses, emails, dates of birth, phone numbers and bill history.\n\nIt is understood that following this, Origin Energy alerted authorities to a potential security breach.\n\nAlleged hacker provides sample of data\n\nThe ABC has spoken to someone claiming to be behind the hack.\n\nThey provided what they claim is a sample of data taken from a bigger customer list and internal screenshots of Origin computer systems.\n\nThe ABC has not been able to confirm with Origin that this data is legitimate.\n\nAnalysis of the sample shows it includes the real contact information of individuals that had not been publicly released in other major security breaches.\n\nOne person whose phone number was in the sample confirmed to the ABC that they had been a customer of Origin until they had recently sold their house.\n\nThe individual, granted anonymity to avoid further potential risk to their privacy, said they were worried having their personal data potentially released as part of the alleged hack could leave them exposed to further damage.\n\n\"It's quite shocking really,\" they said.\n\n\"I run and operate my own business […] My email is attached my business accounts, it's my identification when I sign into certain things.\n\n\"If they have access to those things, it could be really scary.\"\n\nCyber experts say event could be 'canary in the coal mine'\n\nOrigin Energy is one of Australia's leading energy retailers with more than 4.7 million customers.\n\nUpon the announcement, shares in the company quickly dropped by 1.88 per cent.\n\nThe security breach is the latest for major companies in Australia, with Qantas suffering a major hack in 2025, and both Optus and Medibank experiencing mass breaches in 2022.\n\nLast week Partnered Health, which operates a network of GP clinics, was targeted in a cyber attack, with sensitive medical records and personal information stolen.\n\nProfessor of Cyber Security at UNSW, Richard Buckland, said a power company breach would be especially worrying because they manage critical infrastructure.\n\nIn fact, there is a specific law about how 11 \"critical\" industries, including energy, respond to cybersecurity incidents.\n\n\"How important is Origin taking security?\" Professor Buckland asked, adding that a successful cybersecurity attack on an energy company could be a \"canary in the coal mine\".\n\n\"If an energy company is hacked, they could cut off people's power in winter or black things out,\" he warned.\n\nUNSW's resident cybersecurity expert, Professor Sanjay Jha, noted there was very little information currently on what might have happened with Origin.\n\n\"There is no way to verify if the data put to the media is authentic,\" he said.\n\n\"Organised groups who do this kind of thing do resort to this tactic, like extortion first and then release [data] on the dark web.\n\n\"They're putting more pressure on by either going to media or public release. These days you have social media as well.\"\n\nIf you have been impacted, or know more about this story, we'd like to hear from you. Fill out the form below and upload supporting documents or evidence, if any.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/origin-energy-investigating-potential-data-breach/106944660. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-21","numeric_id":21,"title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture","published_at":"2026-07-22T02:53:53+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"And an interesting reveal of ABC-Anthropic talks","text":"Hi!\n\nRead: AI companies ‘stole’ Australian culture, news bosses say\n\nRare to get the heads of most of Australia’s major news and media orgs on the same panel last night, so was interesting to hear them answer questions about the state of the industry — and, naturally, how it’s being impacted by AI.\n\nMy ears perked up when ABC managing director Hugh Marks said that the broadcaster had discussed the ABC’s radio and video archives with Anthropic.\n\nBoth sides today poured cold water on it, saying that there was no current commercial negotiations.\n\nThanks, CW\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals\", webcam, 2026-07-22, https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals](https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture) — webcam — 2026-07-22","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture"},{"id":"camfeed-3","numeric_id":3,"title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","published_at":"2026-07-21T21:20:40+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"The heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp say AI companies should strike licensing deals rather than freely train on Australian news, warning journalism is a public good that must be protected.","text":"The heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp say AI companies should strike licensing deals rather than freely train on Australian news, warning journalism is a public good that must be protected.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":900,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:42+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms","media"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say\", ABC News, 2026-07-22, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202) — ABC News — 2026-07-22","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-21","title":"AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say as they call for licensing deals","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/ai-companies-stole-australian-culture","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/21.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-07-22T02:53:53+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: AI companies 'stole' Australian culture, news bosses say","excerpt":"Hi! Read: AI companies ‘stole’ Australian culture, news bosses say Rare to get the heads of most of Australia’s major news and media orgs on the same panel last night, so was interesting to hear them answer questions about the state of the industry — and, naturally, how it’s bei...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"The heads of Australia's biggest media companies have demanded that AI companies pay for the \"public good\" of Australian news and culture used without permission to train their technology.\n\nAustralian news agencies are already in talks over licensing deals, with the ABC's chief revealing that AI developer Anthropic had approached it about audio and video that capture how Australians speak.\n\nThe comments came during a panel featuring the heads of the ABC, SBS, Nine and News Corp Australasia at the annual Andrew Olle lecture last night.\n\nThe wideranging discussion covered everything from the role of AI in journalism to new detail about the departure of former Today show host Karl Stefanovic.\n\nABC managing director Hugh Marks told the audience journalism was a public good that had to be protected.\n\n\"If we lose sight of the work that's being done … then I think we'll have a worse nation,\" he said.\n\nMr Marks argued that AI companies should strike deals with Australian news companies to license works, but also acknowledged a \"delicate balance\" to provide high-quality information to Australians using AI.\n\nThis obligation to inform should not mean that news organisations should be expected to let AI companies train on news free of charge, SBS managing director Jane Palfreyman said. \"Our collective view on that would be no.\"\n\nNews Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller said AI companies knew that the \"theft\" of Australian works was a \"risk to their business in Australia\".\n\nNine chief executive and managing director Matt Stanton said his company's recent licensing deal, under which its journalism will be cited in answers from Microsoft's AI tool Copilot, was a \"good deal for both sides\".\n\nMr Stanton said that Nine's decision to cut 30 jobs was not \"directly\" a result of AI, when pressed by panel moderator ABC Radio Sydney Mornings host Hamish Macdonald.\n\nHe also said Stefanovic's \"different directions\" of his podcast had prompted Nine's decision to part ways with the former Today host, even before his controversial podcast with Tommy Robinson.\n\nPaying for journalism\n\nThe panel discussion followed a lecture by global news agency Reuters's editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni, who urged news organisations to set firm terms for artificial intelligence companies using their work and to share what they learned when AI tools went wrong.\n\nMs Galloni said journalism remained the source of reliable, first-hand reporting which people and increasingly AI systems depended.\n\nShe cited recent research showing that 10 per cent of people accessed chatbots for news each week, including 16 per cent of people under 35.\n\nMs Galloni argued publishers had no reason to give up on reaching those audience but should strike deals to have their journalism correctly attributed, accurately represented and paid for by the AI companies.\n\n\"Our journalism should be licensed, not taken,\" she said.\n\nShe cited a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week in which he promised that Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists would retain control over work used to build and train AI.\n\nUsing AI in the newsroom\n\nMs Galloni argued that it was the responsibility of news organisations to help society understand the \"pitfalls and possibilities of AI\".\n\nShe said Reuters used AI to help reporters search large collections of documents, find patterns and turn official material into fast news updates, summaries and translations.\n\nShe cited investigations that used AI to document thousands of social media posts and speeches by US President Donald Trump, and to convert 20,000 pages of Syrian government documents into searchable text used in an investigation that uncovered a mass grave.\n\nReuters is also using AI to produce headlines from press releases, draft first paragraphs in urgent stories, generate bullet-point summaries and translate stories, Ms Galloni said.\n\nBut Reuters only published journalism produced with AI once it had been reviewed by a journalist and its use was disclosed when it played a significant role in what was published, she said.\n\nShe said that, on top of AI's struggles with nuance and context, it was also vulnerable to hallucinations and other mistakes. One third-party tool tested by Reuters had once mistaken a SpaceX spacecraft for a missile.\n\n\"Thankfully we caught it,\" she said.\n\nMs Galloni said even advances in AI could not replace the reporting that made news valuable in the first place.\n\nReuters has 2,600 journalists in 165 countries, she said, including 70 staff covering the war in Ukraine and Russia.\n\n\"In my conversations with tech companies, I have often been struck by how little they understand about what original, first-hand, on-the-ground journalism is and looks like,\" she said\n\nSharing what works\n\nMs Galloni called on rival news organisations to share the lessons emerging from those experiments, drawing a comparison to the way that competing journalists would exchange safety information when in war zones.\n\n\"I would venture that it is our collective responsibility — to the public, to society — to enhance our and their understanding about the pitfalls and possibilities of AI,\" she said.\n\nThe Andrew Olle media lecture was first held in 1996 to honour the ABC radio and television broadcaster who died from an undiagnosed brain tumour in 1995.\n\nEach year's lecture features a speech on the future of journalism in Australia and raises funds for charity Brain Cancer Australia.\n\nPrevious lecturers have included New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn, Ray Martin and former News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch, as well as ABC journalists Leigh Sales and Fran Kelly.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-21/news-bosses-call-for-licensing-deals-with-ai-companies/106942202. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-4","numeric_id":4,"title":"Albanese rolls out rule book and red carpet for AI companies","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888","published_at":"2026-07-16T03:16:50+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"If Australia is truly going to coax major AI companies to choose us rather than the other suitor nations with similar ambitions, some tough decisions need to be made soon.","text":"If Australia is truly going to coax major AI companies to choose us rather than the other suitor nations with similar ambitions, some tough decisions need to be made soon.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1374,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:43+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Albanese rolls out rule book and red carpet for AI companies\", ABC News, 2026-07-16, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Albanese rolls out rule book and red carpet for AI companies](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888) — ABC News — 2026-07-16","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888","full_text":"Prime Minister Anthony Albanese chose an intriguing backdrop for his much-hyped speech on how Australia will respond to the AI boom.\n\nIt was hard to ignore. Both literally, because a giant plastic #USYD sign took up a great portion of the stage, but also because the prime minister began with a reflection on his formative years at the institution.\n\nThe choice of venue was ostensibly because the University of Sydney's researchers and students are embracing AI. They're using it in research, they're making commercial products with it, and they're adapting their teaching to it.\n\nWhat went unmentioned, perhaps understandably, is the way that AI is turning the university sector upside down. AI-assisted cheating is rampant, educators are being forced to redesign curricula on the fly, and there are fears AI, if misused, may stop students from developing their own skills.\n\nIt's a neat encapsulation of the thorniness of AI as an issue.\n\nThere is a near-infinite amount of hype, with many businesses, institutions and people looking at it as a great opportunity to be seized. It's already becoming a big part of daily life in industries as wideranging as health, banking and mining.\n\nAt the same time, there's a great public unease about the way the insurgent technology is stressing systems that were already buckling: our challenged higher education sector, our electricity grid, even our shared sense of reality.\n\nAustralia to harness benefits of AI\n\nThe prime minister drew a line between his experiences at university and the current moment.\n\nAlbanese studied political economics during the late 1970s and early 80s, amid the Reagan-Thatcher era.\n\nRather than minimising what the government owed its citizens, Australia, Albanese was proud to say, went the other way and instead came up with policies like Medicare that expanded what the state might do.\n\nNo doubt the PM was influenced by his studies, but the common stories we heard about a young Albanese had little to do with what was happening in lecture halls.\n\nNotoriously, Albanese cut his teeth as a political participant in the grand old tradition of university protest: climbing clock towers, doing sit-ins, and dumping a caravan at the university with a message scrawled across it.\n\nWhat would that young activist think of AI today? We can't know for sure. There is one part of the University of Sydney campus that is covered with graffiti saying \"F*** AI\" — a cruder but perhaps representative view of the fears that young people have about AI's risks outweighing its benefits.\n\nNow, in a very different position, Albanese has used this speech to mark out his intention to have Australia harness the benefits of AI.\n\nOne of his announcements was the creation of the Office of the AI, a new unit inside the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.\n\nThis is meant to coordinate the government's response to AI, bringing together all the various disparate departments and agencies working on issues that cross portfolios.\n\nRules for data centres\n\nAnother major part of his speech was to make clear that what had been essentially voluntary guidelines for data centre providers would now become something binding. The idea is to come up with some basic rules for large data centres, have the states agree to them, and pass them into law early next year. Prior to this, states had been largely going it alone on approving data centres.\n\nWe got some details on what these might look like: data centres providing more energy than they consume, covering the cost of their connections to the grid and minimising water use.\n\nBoth of these measures have been fairly widely welcomed from groups ranging from the Business Council of Australia, to Australian Unions, to AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic, to creative groups like APRA and ACMOS. (The Greens have criticised the announcements, saying that standards and greater powers need to be figured out before we build any more data centres.)\n\nEveryone likes the idea of some centralisation and certainty. And while these new standards don't provide certainty just yet — given that we don't yet know specific details about how big a data centre needs to be to qualify or how much water it will be allowed to use — they're a promise that certainty is imminent.\n\nNow, here comes the hard part: Certainty also means making tough decisions.\n\nNo doubt Albanese hopes that one of the messages that people take away is that Australia is being tough on big tech, dictating our demands if big tech companies want to come Down Under.\n\nBut Albanese's speech also made another message very clear: Australia wants and needs major AI companies to make major investments here. Assuming you tick a few of these boxes, we're ready to roll out the red carpet.\n\nWhat was striking was the way that, despite the talk of building trust, building AI tools, and building sovereign capability, there was little talk of supporting Australian-built AI models, of which there are some and could be more.\n\nNor was there a mention of the open-source AI models that are the free alternatives to ChatGPT and Claude that anyone can run.\n\nWhile these models are not cutting edge, they are increasingly being used by people and businesses around the world because they are endlessly customisable and typically significantly cheaper.\n\nWhile Australia might not have a frontier model AI company like OpenAI or Anthropic, these alternatives offer us an option to make sure we're not solely dependent on products from a handful of companies run by a handful of Silicon Valley types.\n\nThere was no new money flagged and there were no real new powers announced. For all the challenges mentioned across government, there was little new information in the speech about how we're going to handle the society-wide impacts of AI outside of data centres.\n\nA moment to be seized\n\nOutside of the Great Hall, the University of Sydney's quad was mostly empty. It's university holidays so, instead of uni students, there was what looked like a gaggle of school-aged kids sitting and playing on the green, manicured grass, completely unaware of what was going on just inside.\n\nThat's what AI feels like at the moment.\n\nFor all the promises of drastic change — mass job losses, data centres crowding out our cities, people eschewing real people for AI companions en masse — we haven't seen major upheaval yet. If you sit on the grass on a beautiful Sydney day, it's like AI doesn't even exist.\n\nThat's because both proponents and critics are projecting forward. They're looking at the tech and the early signs and saying, this is what we need to do now, even if it will take years for its full effects to be felt.\n\nSo it's one thing for Albanese to say that the federal government truly believes that things are urgent, that this is an important moment, and that we will do what it takes to seize the moment.\n\nIt's another to actually commit to making those hard decisions when that means trade-offs right now that will affect our work, our communities and our future.\n\nCopyright was mentioned, with Albanese giving a robust defence of Australian creatives against \"theft\" by big tech and alluding to a solution. Right now, however, most major AI companies don't seem like they're in a rush to hash out deals, so it's not clear what will force these companies to come to the table.\n\nThere seems to be a promise that Australians won't pay more for electricity, but there's no talk of what happens to Australia's climate goals if we build out power-hungry data centres, even if they're bringing their own energy.\n\nAnd a promise of community consultation in sped-up and simplified data centre approvals is welcome. But what happens when a local community says no, even with all the new conditions? If we accept Albanese's case that computing power is important to our sovereignty, why are we waiting for global AI companies to decide to come to us to build it?\n\nThese are the tough decisions that need to be made and, if Australia is truly going to coax these major AI companies to choose us rather than the other suitor nations with similar ambitions, they need to be made soon.\n\nOtherwise, a decision delayed is a decision made.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/albanese-artficial-intelligence-speech-sydney-university/106917888. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-5","numeric_id":5,"title":"A 60-year-old law could decide if Australia gets billions in AI investments","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890","published_at":"2026-07-14T04:38:52+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Tens of billions of dollars in investment, and Australia's ambition to become a global AI power, could hinge on a law written in 1968 for an era of black-and-white television, film and radio.","text":"Tens of billions of dollars in investment, and Australia's ambition to become a global AI power, could hinge on a law written in 1968 for an era of black-and-white television, film and radio.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1379,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:43+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms","media"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"A 60-year-old law could decide if Australia gets billions in AI investments\", ABC News, 2026-07-14, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [A 60-year-old law could decide if Australia gets billions in AI investments](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890) — ABC News — 2026-07-14","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890","full_text":"Tens of billions of dollars in investment, and Australia's ambition to become a global AI power, could hinge on a law passed before humans walked on the moon, the Sydney Opera House opened, or Gough Whitlam became prime minister.\n\nAustralia's copyright law was written in 1968 for an era of black-and-white television, film and radio.\n\nMore than half a century later, copyright has become an unlikely red line for AI companies looking to make Australia their second home.\n\nThese companies say the legal uncertainty over copyright and their technology is a major hurdle to them making significant investments on Australian soil.\n\nAt the same time, writers, musicians, artists and publishers say they want control of their own work and fair value for what has already been taken from them.\n\nAustralia in hot demand for investment\n\nTomorrow, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to make a major speech about how the government is approaching AI and its rules for companies looking to expand to Australia.\n\nInternal government documents obtained by the ABC under freedom of information laws show why Mr Albanese believes Australia has leverage.\n\nAhead of a May meeting with the CEO of Anthropic, the maker of Claude AI, a Prime Minister & Cabinet briefing shows the company indicated Australia's stability, renewable energy potential and close US ties placed it high on the list to become the first country outside the US to host its data centres.\n\nBuilding these data centres could be worth tens of billions of dollars, according to The Australian Financial Review's reporting of deals discussed with local companies.\n\nOther companies are eyeing similar expansions here too.\n\nIn return, Anthropic has a number of asks, but according to the Treasury briefing obtained under FOI, any major investment would be \"contingent on clarity of copyright settings\".\n\nWhy is AI and copyright so complex?\n\nEven before generative AI arrived, Australia's copyright system was already \"incredibly complex and complicated\" and \"basically dysfunctional\", UNSW copyright law professor Kathy Bowrey told the ABC.\n\nShe said there had been updates over the years with exceptions for new technologies.\n\nBut the system was not designed for the onslaught of generative AI companies collecting millions of books, images, recordings and web pages to train machines to generate new material.\n\nPublic datasets, company disclosures and evidence filed in US lawsuits show major AI companies have absorbed enormous numbers of copyrighted books, songs, images and news reports to train AI models that power products such as ChatGPT and Claude.\n\nIt is not just a single copyright infringement, either.\n\nIn the act of training a model, a company may collect and organise material, make copies, test the resulting model and then use the material again.\n\nEach stage might be considered an infringement, Professor Bowrey said.\n\nAustralian law also gives developers fewer potential defences for AI training than US law, where courts can consider whether a particular use is fair, Professor Bowrey said.\n\nShe said it was \"probable\" there had been copyright infringement in some stages of training AI, despite there being no known AI copyright case before an Australian court.\n\nProfessor Bowrey said that may have flown from the existing challenges of copyright enforcement, with the expensive nature of litigation limiting cases to large companies, combined with the jurisdictional challenge that major tech companies trained their AI outside of Australia.\n\nAustralian creators already trained on\n\nGeorge Nicholas is a Grammy-nominated Australian mixing engineer and former member of the electronic group Seekae.\n\nThe ABC found 83 listings for Seekae tracks across four enormous song datasets published by US-based outlet The Atlantic as part of its investigation into songs being used to train AI models.\n\nNicholas suspected his music would be among the millions of songs used to train AI without permission, but having it confirmed had an impact on him.\n\n\"You knew that your IP was being trained on, but then to see it in the dataset … it really becomes real how much of your work exists within the training data of these models,\" he said.\n\nWhile creatives say AI companies have harvested culture and works worth billions without pay or permission, technology and business groups argue Australia's laws are blocking investment without producing more income for creators.\n\nAtlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar told the National Press Club last year that changing copyright law could unlock \"billions of dollars of foreign investment\".\n\nBoth the tech and business councils of Australia have called for reform, and the Productivity Commission has also flagged it as an area for review.\n\nYet the choice is not necessarily binary, between unrestricted access to every copyrighted work and no Australian AI industry.\n\nMaincode, an Australian AI company, chose to build its chatbot Matilda as a specialist model using only copyright-free material and data supplied by customers.\n\n\"You don't need a model that's hoovered up every single piece of data on the planet,\" chief executive Dave Lemphers said.\n\nMr Lemphers said while that showed Australian companies could still develop AI models here, he acknowledged he did not know whether a general-purpose system such as ChatGPT or Claude, trained on a much broader range of material, could be.\n\nProfessor Bowrey said the current policy setting could lead developers to build early proofs of concept in Australia, then move offshore once they were big enough to get outside funding or were headed for great commercial success.\n\nSupporters of reform point to the status quo as broken. They say training is legally risky in Australia due to the copyright issue, but Australians face no barriers using models that have been trained overseas.\n\nThis means jobs and businesses move offshore and Australian creatives receive nothing, they say.\n\nOpponents argue changing the law would reward companies that build valuable products from other people's work without permission.\n\nWhat are the options from here?\n\nAustralia could leave the law unchanged, as rights-holder groups are urging.\n\nAccording to the Treasury briefing, Anthropic argued it could negotiate with major rights holders, but identifying and purchasing licences from a \"long tail\" of smaller owners was too difficult.\n\nRights-holder groups reject the argument that licensing is unworkable, pointing to deals already struck across music, news and other sectors.\n\nAPRA AMCOS, which handles royalties for Australian and New Zealand artists, says no major AI platform has made a genuine attempt to negotiate with Australian rights holders.\n\nAnother option, though one the government has repeatedly ruled out, would be text-and-data-mining copyright exception, which would simply allow anyone to train AI on copyrighted material, no strings attached.\n\nCollective licensing would let one or more organisations negotiate and distribute payments for a group of rights holders.\n\nThat could simplify negotiations, but would leave difficult questions about who was represented, whether it was compulsory, how usage was measured and whether payments reached individual creators.\n\nThe media union, MEAA, has separately proposed guaranteeing an ongoing share of licensing payments to creators, regardless of whether they transfer their copyright.\n\nAI safety charity Good Ancestors has circulated a plan within government to create a permit, for companies to purchase, to train on copyrighted material.\n\nA separate fund would support creatives, but its payments would not be tied to permit revenue.\n\nNot just an issue for Australia\n\nAccording to media reporting, the prime minister is not expected to announce a decision tomorrow.\n\nBut copyright is the elephant in the room for discussion about AI in Australia, and whenever a decision is made it will ripple beyond Australia.\n\nIn a submission to an Australian inquiry last year, the US Copyright Alliance argued an Australian licensing deal could be cited in American courts as proof that it was possible to hash out an agreement.\n\nBoth AI companies and rights holders will view any Australian deal through the lens of a global tussle and not just a matter for AI and copyright in Australia.\n\nAnd further to that, a deal on copyright would settle only one part of the debate over AI and training data.\n\nQuestions remain around whether Australians would have any protections over their likeness or the imitation of their voice, privacy, misinformation, Indigenous cultural rights, AI safety and more.\n\nProfessor Bowrey said the debate risked asking copyright law to solve problems far beyond its purpose that it would ultimately fail to address.\n\n\"Copyright has never been a cultural policy,\" she said.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-14/copyright-law-battleground-in-australia-ai-boom/106891890. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-6","numeric_id":6,"title":"A 'well-known' risk caused Telstra's outage. Why did it get caught out?","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532","published_at":"2026-07-10T18:43:17+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Telstra faces an outage investigation as an expert says legal gaps may let the telco off the hook.","text":"Telstra faces an outage investigation as an expert says legal gaps may let the telco off the hook.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":672,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:44+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"A 'well-known' risk caused Telstra's outage. Why did it get caught out?\", ABC News, 2026-07-11, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [A 'well-known' risk caused Telstra's outage. Why did it get caught out?](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532) — ABC News — 2026-07-11","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532","full_text":"Pressure is mounting on Telstra and the government over how vulnerabilities to the telco's infrastructure are managed.\n\nIt comes after ABC reporting the company had been warned for months ahead of its mobile network collapsing this week.\n\nThe expert tasked with reviewing Australia's critical infrastructure laws told the ABC on Friday she had highlighted gaps that may have left telcos unprepared for this kind of obligation.\n\nAustralia's biggest telco is facing a formal investigation that will probe not only what caused Wednesday's failure, but what the telco had done to prepare for a timing risk its own executives say was fundamental to modern mobile networks.\n\nLaws that govern the management of the country's critical infrastructure have also come under renewed scrutiny.\n\nTelstra CEO Vicki Brady acknowledged at a press conference on Friday issues with the crucial timing system were \"well-known\" in the industry.\n\nGovernment agencies and experts had flagged this vulnerability in the months and years leading up to this week's failure.\n\nBut Ms Brady and chief financial officer Michael Ackland did not directly confirm whether Telstra had a dedicated backup timing system, or if the telco had a specific plan to address this type of failure.\n\nA spokesperson for Telstra told the ABC it had launched a full investigation into the error, including steps to bolster the reliability and resilience of its timing system.\n\nThe telco regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has signalled Telstra's network design would be part of its investigation into the outage.\n\nAt a press conference in Canberra on Friday, ACMA deputy chair Adam Suckling said the regulator would look at Telstra's equipment and how it had configured its network.\n\nCommunications Minister Anika Wells told the same press conference Telstra was covered by critical infrastructure legislation, which meant it had to observe higher standards and more rigorous processes.\n\nTelco legal gaps left unaddressed\n\nJill Slay, who conducted the government's independent review of the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act earlier this year, said the outage bolstered her concerns that the law did not do enough to ensure telcos were prepared for this kind of risk.\n\n\"I would say it underpins my concerns expressed in the review that we should be looking at the defence of [positioning, navigation and timing] as part of our reliance on space technology,\" Dr Slay said.\n\nUnder new rules introduced by the federal government last year, Telstra is legally required to identify and plan to prevent and mitigate risks to its network.\n\nDr Slay did not comment on Telstra's obligations but noted that the law in its current form left gaps that meant it may not have been legally required to address this specific timing issue.\n\nHer review recommended existing critical infrastructure legislation needed to be made less complicated and giving more powers to the home affairs minister to compel critical infrastructure providers to ensure their security.\n\nIt also found the law faced gaps in addressing emerging threats, including space-based service dependencies like timing systems.\n\nTelstra did not immediately respond to further questions about whether it had failsafe measures that were supposed to identify issues like this.\n\nTelstra's timing network under investigation\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Ackland said the outage was the result of a \"time synchronisation issue\" caused by a \"glitch in the software that reset the GPS timer\".\n\nWhen asked about whether Telstra had a backup timing system on Friday, Ms Brady said: \"Our network is built with a lot of redundancy put in place, and that will be part of this investigation.\"\n\n#recirculationrecommendations-106895768\n\nAs part of its warnings in recent years, the federal government's Critical Infrastructure Security Centre had told critical infrastructure operators to understand where they obtained time, use trusted fallbacks where possible and test resilience against timing failures.\n\nAnother expert, Swinburne University's Allison Kealy, said she had personally approached Telstra this year to raise timing as an issue and to seek support for further research into the matter.\n\nMs Brady confirmed that Telstra had been approached by Professor Kealy and said the company \"welcome[d] that engagement\".","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-11/telstra-gps-timing-network-failure-back-up-systems/106902532. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-7","numeric_id":7,"title":"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","published_at":"2026-07-10T03:45:44+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Government agencies and academics both recently warned Telstra it was vulnerable to the type of error that caused this week's national outage.","text":"Government agencies and academics both recently warned Telstra it was vulnerable to the type of error that caused this week's national outage.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1206,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:44+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage\", ABC News, 2026-07-10, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Government, experts repeatedly warned of issue that caused Telstra outage](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906) — ABC News — 2026-07-10","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906","full_text":"Telstra was warned by federal government agencies and academics for months that it was vulnerable to the type of error that brought Australia's biggest mobile network to its knees this week, the ABC can reveal.\n\nFor years, public alerts by government agencies and submissions from researchers had flagged a scenario affecting telcos that now looks prescient: cascading problems caused by a single point of technical failure connected to timekeeping.\n\nOn Wednesday, that risk was no longer hypothetical.\n\nTelstra identified an issue about 4:30am affecting \"a number of nodes that help keep time across our mobile network\".\n\nBy the time services were mostly restored, the telco ruled out a cyber attack as the source of the disruption and instead pointed to a software fault affecting timekeeping.\n\nWhile timekeeping and the satellite systems on which it predominantly relies are little known to the public, they have repeatedly been identified as major potential points of failure, long before this outage that one expert said was Australia's first national timekeeping-related infrastructure failure.\n\nTelstra was contacted for comment but did not respond by deadline.\n\nWhy telcos need to know the time GPS is best known as the technology that helps people find their way around, but it also serves a lesser-known function: transmitting the time as well as location. Those time signals are used by countless industries to make sure different parts of their systems agree on exactly what time it is. Modern infrastructure depends on separate computers, payment systems, data centres and transport networks agreeing on what happened and when. For telecommunications networks, this is important for functions such as passing calls and data between mobile towers so they reach the right recipient.\n\nTelstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland on Wednesday attributed the outage to a \"time synchronisation issue\" caused by a \"glitch in the software that reset the GPS timer\".\n\nThis morning, chief executive Vicki Brady acknowledged the warnings, saying this type of error was \"well-known\" in the industry.\n\nNeither she nor Mr Ackland would confirm whether Telstra had a back-up timing system or if it had prepared a plan for a systemic error of this nature.\n\n\"Time synchronisation is critical to the way all networks run. And, yes, it clearly has been a vulnerability. But we'll come back on that in our investigation,\" Mr Ackland told a press conference.\n\nSwinburne University professor Allison Kealy, an expert in positioning, navigation and timing, told the ABC she had raised this exact scenario when she approached Telstra earlier this year while seeking support for a proposed critical infrastructure resilience research centre.\n\nProfessor Kealy said the pitch to telcos and other critical infrastructure operators was that they needed to identify shared points of failure before an outage exposed them.\n\n\"We have been approaching all the critical infrastructure sectors to tell them, we have to act now,\" she said.\n\nAustralia's government-run Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre has also repeatedly raised timekeeping as a major concern for critical infrastructure providers.\n\nIn 2024, it put out a public alert about how \"Australia's critical infrastructure increasingly relies on the delivery of positioning, navigation and timing\".\n\nIn October last year, another alert from the centre singled out \"critical communications assets\" as being dependent on these timekeeping systems, including space-based satellites. It reiterated the legal obligations to ensure providers had backups if those systems failed.\n\n#recirculationrecommendations-106895768\n\nThe alert was published about the same time the federal government created a new legal requirement for critical telecommunications providers to maintain a risk management program covering material hazards and mitigations.\n\nThe government's guidance for complying with this new requirement explicitly mentions preparing for anything that impairs systems that rely \"on satellite and navigational technology\" such as timing.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs confirmed Telstra had provided it with its risk management program.\n\nCommunications Minister Anika Wells said the government expected the telco to fulfil these requirements.\n\n\"Telstra is captured by critical infrastructure legislation, which means it has to observe higher standards and more rigorous processes when it comes to discharging their duties,\" she told reporters today.\n\nAustralian Communications and Media Authority deputy chair Adam Suckling said the agency's investigation into the outage would consider the timing equipment failure.\n\nExperts outside the government have also been sounding the alarm about Australia's dependence on GPS for almost 20 years.\n\nAs early as 2008, University of Adelaide professor Don Sinnott told a Senate inquiry that GPS was used for precise timing, on which telecommunications, banking and commerce relied to a \"little-appreciated extent\".\n\nIn recent times, jamming has become an almost daily occurrence in the Russia-Ukraine war and has even affected ships around the Strait of Hormuz.\n\nMuch of the academic and public policy work about GPS vulnerability has focused on jamming and spoofing, but experts say the same dependence on satellite signals also creates timing risks when systems fail.\n\nThe first suspected national outage caused by timekeeping issues\n\nProfessor Kealy said Mr Ackland's explanation of what happened raised questions about the resilience of Telstra's timekeeping systems.\n\n\"If a single software fault could disrupt the [timing] architecture across a large portion of their network, then there's a general expectation that they are aware of single points of failure,\" she said.\n\nProfessor Kealy gave the analogy of having both a wall clock and a clock on a microwave in your home. They are independent clocks, but they can still share a common point of failure.\n\nIf one clock broke, the other would likely continue working. But if the house lost power, both might stop keeping time.\n\nAndrew Dempster, a professor with UNSW's Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research, said he could not recall another timing-related failure causing disruption on this scale in Australia.\n\nProfessor Dempster said while the outage appeared to show a failure rather than manipulation of GPS, it still demonstrated how vulnerable GPS-based timing systems could be.\n\n\"People don't understand that it's GPS timing that is the most important thing in terms of how vulnerabilities can make things go wrong in daily life,\" he said.\n\nProfessor Kealy said the outage raised questions about whether Telstra's primary and backup timing systems shared a common point of failure.\n\nPreparing for timing failures\n\nProfessor Kealy said preventing problems like this required multiple sources of time that could be checked against each other before a bad signal or software fault flowed through connected systems.\n\nShe said there was a need for more thorough testing of these systems across sectors and a framework for how critical infrastructure providers should prepare risk mitigation plans.\n\nShe said a national timing centre, like the UK's recently created National Timing Centre program, could fulfil such a function.\n\nProfessor Dempster said Australia should also address the practical barriers to testing GPS resilience, because testing systems against jamming required transmitting into a protected radio band.\n\nAustralia needed to \"establish regimes […] where that testing can be done safely,\" he said.\n\nBut Professor Kealy said the responsibility did not stop with Telstra or other telcos.\n\nOther industries that depend on telecommunications networks also needed to understand how much of their own resilience relied on those networks staying online.\n\n\"One system fails, telecoms fail, and suddenly you see transport failure. Transport failure leads to freight and logistics failures. The list goes on,\" she said.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/telstra-warned-about-vulnerability-before-national-outage/106896906. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-8","numeric_id":8,"title":"AI jobs report finds no major disruption, but some warning signs","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304","published_at":"2026-07-08T02:10:52+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Artificial intelligence is not yet causing a broad disruption to Australia's labour market, according to a government report.","text":"Artificial intelligence is not yet causing a broad disruption to Australia's labour market, according to a government report.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":705,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:45+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"AI jobs report finds no major disruption, but some warning signs\", ABC News, 2026-07-08, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [AI jobs report finds no major disruption, but some warning signs](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304) — ABC News — 2026-07-08","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304","full_text":"Amid warnings that artificial intelligence could wipe out white-collar jobs and cause high-profile lay-offs, the federal government's first major look at AI's effect on employment has found the sky is not falling.\n\nYet.\n\nAccording to the first-of-its-kind report from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Australia's job market remains strong but there are some early signs of weakening around jobs predicted to be most affected by the technology, such as telemarketers.\n\nIt comes amid growing public anxiety about AI and employment, with thousands of Australian tech workers laid off this year in cuts linked to AI.\n\nEmployment and Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth said the report should calm fears of imminent disruption to Australia's job market.\n\n\"Artificial intelligence could yet reshape the jobs market in Australia, but this report shows labour market conditions remain strong by historical standards, youth outcomes have mostly held up, and occupational reshuffling has not accelerated,\" she said.\n\nHowever, the minister said the Albanese government would monitor the market and regulate AI to harness its benefits for Australian workers.\n\nJob market steady with warnings at the edges\n\nThe government's report takes a bird's-eye view of how Australia's job market has changed since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, based on labour market data and statistical analysis.\n\nWhile the market is in a strong position overall with low unemployment, the government's analysis includes evidence that could be the early signs of AI's impact.\n\nIt looked at the difference between growth in industries believed to be exposed to AI, including registry clerks, telemarketers and administrative roles.\n\nEmployment in the occupations most exposed to AI grew by 5.6 per cent between November 2022 and February 2026, the report found, compared with 9.5 per cent in the least-exposed occupations.\n\nThe report suggested that jobs exposed to AI had about 2 per cent lower employment by February this year than they would have under a pre-ChatGPT trend.\n\nBut the report repeatedly cautioned that it was not definitive proof AI was impacting those types of jobs, noting AI-exposed jobs were already facing weaker growth before ChatGPT was released.\n\nThe report also had some counterintuitive findings about AI and work.\n\nWhile a few high-profile tech companies have linked recent job cuts to AI, the report said employment in Australian software development roles had actually increased by 25 per cent since November 2022.\n\nJobs for people aged 20 to 24 had also grown slightly faster than jobs for people aged 25 and over since the introduction of ChatGPT, while young graduate outcomes remained resilient.\n\nThe continued growth in youth employment combined with a lack of rapid reshuffling across occupations — a potential sign that AI disruption was causing people to adapt by changing careers — was also inconsistent with AI-fuelled job market disruption, the report said.\n\nThe report lends further credence to previous research that AI was reshaping the labour market and slowing hiring in some exposed jobs, but had not yet produced clear evidence of widespread job losses.\n\nThe findings also put Australia at odds with the United States, which is experiencing a weakening of its job market.\n\nToo late to wait\n\nThe government said the report would serve as an important benchmark for the future monitoring of AI's effect on work.\n\nOutside of the research, it has created a regular meeting between government, employers and unions to monitor and address the effects of AI on the workplace.\n\nMs Rishworth said the research also reaffirmed its commitment to make sure AI helped create \"good jobs\".\n\n\"We will continue to make sure Australians are supported through this change, with the skills, training and pathways needed to adapt and benefit,\" she said.\n\nThe federal government has faced criticism that it is failing to pre-empt the threat to workers from AI by political opponents ranging from One Nation senator Pauline Hanson to the Greens.\n\nCoalition employment spokesperson Jane Hume has been contacted for comment.\n\nScientia Professor of AI at UNSW Sydney, Toby Walsh, said the absence of clear job losses did not mean governments could afford to wait before preparing workers for change.\n\n\"When the numbers are showing significant impact of AI on jobs, it's already too late to respond,\" Professor Walsh said.\n\n\"We actually have to be proactive.\"","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-08/government-report-finds-ai-not-yet-causing-mass-job-losses/106889304. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-22","numeric_id":22,"title":"One in every class: AI-assisted online sexual abuse affects one in 25 Australian teens","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/one-in-every-class-ai-assisted-online","published_at":"2026-07-06T22:51:32+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Young Australians are also more likely to disclose victimisation to AI than authorities or support services","text":"Good morning!\n\nRead: One in 25 teens affected by AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds\n\nThis research is the first nationally representative survey looking at the role AI is playing in online victimisation among young people. It contains some deeply shocking numbers.\n\nWhat stood out to me is how quickly a technology that’s only a few years old has become a major part of the abuse landscape for young people. One in four cases of non-consensual sexual image sharing for young Australians now involves AI (presumably produced by scungy “deepfake” or “nudify” apps).\n\nThe study also sheds light on how often young people are turning to AI for help. It’s striking that children are now using AI to disclose abuse or seek support more than they are to authorities like the police.\n\nI think this speaks to the broader moment we’re in with AI. It’s now integrated into so many parts of our lives. On one hand, this technology is being misused in ways that create new harms and supercharge old ones. On the other, people are also turning to AI for support and guidance.\n\nThere’s a complicated and nuanced conversation to be had about how we feel about people turning to AI rather than other people . I think many people would feel concerned if AI only functioned as a replacement for human support. But for some young people, it may provide access to support or a first point of disclosure when they don’t have trusted people or services available to them. It’s not in this study but, anecdotally, AI is also filling the gap, sometimes.\n\nThe study makes one thing very clear: AI has crashed into every part of our lives, good and bad, and young people are on the front lines.\n\nThanks\n\nCW!\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"One in every class: AI-assisted online sexual abuse affects one in 25 Australian teens\", webcam, 2026-07-07, https://webcam.substack.com/p/one-in-every-class-ai-assisted-online","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [One in every class: AI-assisted online sexual abuse affects one in 25 Australian teens](https://webcam.substack.com/p/one-in-every-class-ai-assisted-online) — webcam — 2026-07-07","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/one-in-every-class-ai-assisted-online"},{"id":"camfeed-9","numeric_id":9,"title":"Boys major victims of AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000","published_at":"2026-07-06T22:16:55+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"About one in every 25 Australians under the age of 18 has been the victim or knows a victim of artificial intelligence-assisted online sexual abuse, according to a new study.","text":"About one in every 25 Australians under the age of 18 has been the victim or knows a victim of artificial intelligence-assisted online sexual abuse, according to a new study.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":983,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:45+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Boys major victims of AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds\", ABC News, 2026-07-07, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Boys major victims of AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000) — ABC News — 2026-07-07","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-22","title":"One in every class: AI-assisted online sexual abuse affects one in 25 Australian teens","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/one-in-every-class-ai-assisted-online","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/22.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-07-06T22:51:32+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Boys major victims of AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds","excerpt":"Good morning! Read: One in 25 teens affected by AI-assisted online sexual abuse, study finds This research is the first nationally representative survey looking at the role AI is playing in online victimisation among young people. It contains some deeply shocking numbers. What s...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"About one in every 25 Australians under the age of 18 has been the victim or has a friend who has been a victim of artificial intelligence-assisted online sexual abuse.\n\nThat number — roughly equivalent to one student in every year 12 classroom — comes from the first nationally representative study looking at the role AI is playing in online child sexual victimisation in Australia.\n\nIt shows AI has become both a tool for the abuse of young people, but also one of the main avenues to disclose or seek help afterwards.\n\nAdolescents are already turning to AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude to disclose or seek help for online sexual victimisation more often than they do to police or other authorities, the study found.\n\nSupport services: 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service: 1800 211 028 Bravehearts (support for child sexual abuse survivors): 1800 272 831 Centre Against Sexual Violence: (07) 3808 3299 Lifeline on 13 11 14 Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800 Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 Headspace on 1800 650 890 ReachOut at au.reachout.com SANE on 1800 187 263\n\nTim Cubitt, deputy director of the Australian Cybercrime Observatory at the University of Adelaide, which conducted the study, said the findings showed AI had \"well and truly arrived\" in the space.\n\n\"This is a seismic shift in our understanding of the vulnerability and victimisation of young people online,\" he said.\n\nFirst ever nationally representative research on child AI-assisted abuse\n\nThe research, a collaboration with the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children Australia (ICMEC) and the Australian Federal Police's Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, surveyed 1,894 Australians aged 16 to 18.\n\nResearchers asked participants about their experiences of non-consensual sharing of a sexual image and sexual solicitation by an adult.\n\nThey found that 15 per cent of young Australians had experienced online child sexual victimisation, including non-consensual sexual image sharing.\n\nAbout one in four of those involved AI, the research found.\n\nThis typically involved so-called deepfake or nudify services that use AI to create sexually explicit images of people using real photos as source material. A further one in nine of all teens said that a friend had experienced AI-assisted online sexual victimisation.\n\nProfessor Cubitt said these statistics were likely to be a minimum estimate because researchers did not include respondents who said they were not sure whether AI was involved.\n\nHe said the study also found when one young person had experienced online sexual victimisation, there was a much higher likelihood someone else in their friendship group also had the same experience.\n\nBoys are major victims of AI-assisted abuse\n\nThe study found 19 per cent of girls said they had experienced online sexual victimisation compared with 11 per cent of boys, a finding in line with previous research.\n\nWith AI, that pattern flips.\n\nA larger proportion of the online sexual abuse for boys involved AI, with 27 per cent of boys' experiences involving the technology compared with just 9 per cent of girls.\n\nProfessor Cubitt said that was a significant change from historical patterns of online sexual victimisation.\n\n\"This is not something that we've seen before,\" he said.\n\nBoys were significantly more likely than girls to seek help from AI, regardless of whether they had been victimised, the study found.\n\nMore than two-thirds of young people who had experienced online sexual victimisation disclosed it to someone, with the most common recipients being friends (66 per cent) and parents (43 per cent).\n\nThe next most common recipient (19 per cent) were AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Claude.\n\nThat was more common than disclosing to authorities, with police, teachers and other reporting lines (15 per cent).\n\nMore than one in five respondents asked for psychosocial counselling from AI each week, and one in 10 disclosed hurtful experiences to AI each week, the research found.\n\nICMEC Australia chief Colm Gannon called for \"an ethical development\" for AI so a chatbot did not just accept and forget a disclosure, but then referred people to services\n\nThe goal, he said, should be bringing them into a service that could give them a \"warm reception\".\n\nHow AI companies are responding\n\nWhile all major AI companies have safeguards supposed to stop their tools being used to facilitate abuse, there is little information about their approach to dealing with disclosures or help-seeking around abuse.\n\nOpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to questions by deadline.\n\nOpenAI's public policies prohibit using its services to exploit, endanger or sexualise anyone under 18, including child sexual abuse material, grooming and underage sexual role-play.\n\nIt says users who attempt to generate or upload child sexual abuse material are banned and reported to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.\n\nAnthropic says it strictly prohibits child sexual abuse material on its services and uses hash-matching on its first-party services to detect known child sexual abuse material in uploaded images, which it reports to the same US clearing house.\n\nOpenAI's ChatGPT has a minimum age of 13, whereas Anthropic's Claude AI prohibits users under the age of 18.\n\nEarlier this year, new rules for AI providers by the eSafety commissioner came into effect that required services to have ways for users to report material — including content depicting self-harm — but they did not set any expectations for mandatory reporting by the services of any disclosure.\n\nProfessor Cubitt said the unanswered issue was whether young people who disclosed victimisation to AI systems were receiving appropriate advice and referrals.\n\nMore disclosures could improve outcomes for young people, Professor Cubitt said, but only if they were made to a source that could support them.\n\n\"There's a real duty of care here among tech companies and AI platforms,\" he said.\n\n\"The crucial next step is to ensure that these disclosures are supported and appropriately referred to the services that these young people want to be engaging with.\"","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-07/1-in-25-children-targeted-with-ai-sexual-imagery/106878000. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-10","numeric_id":10,"title":"Experts and union warn about ABC's AI use","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364","published_at":"2026-07-05T19:06:28+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Experts and the journalists’ union have welcomed the ABC’s plans to use artificial intelligence responsibly, but warned misuse could damage trust in the public broadcaster.","text":"Experts and the journalists’ union have welcomed the ABC’s plans to use artificial intelligence responsibly, but warned misuse could damage trust in the public broadcaster.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1118,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:46+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","media"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Experts and union warn about ABC's AI use\", ABC News, 2026-07-06, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Experts and union warn about ABC's AI use](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364) — ABC News — 2026-07-06","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364","full_text":"Experts and the journalists' union have cautiously welcomed the ABC's plans to use artificial intelligence responsibly, but warned misuse could damage trust in the public broadcaster.\n\nThe ABC is preparing to roll out AI to staff, including running a trial to use AI to help write digital news, as it tries to embrace a technology many Australians distrust.\n\nLast month, ABC executives told staff the broadcaster had updated its AI guidelines, struck a deal with Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and begun trialling a tool that turns regional radio bulletins into online articles.\n\nAn ABC spokesperson said AI tools offered \"significant benefits\" to assist its journalism, including freeing up time for original news-gathering and helping staff do routine tasks more efficiently.\n\n\"Our trusted news is produced by ABC journalists — distinctive, original journalism that AI cannot replicate,\" the spokesperson said.\n\nNo question whether ABC staff will use AI: executives\n\nIn an all-staff email sent on June 25, managing director Hugh Marks and chief people officer Deena Amorelli outlined the ABC's new approach to AI.\n\n\"The question facing every public broadcaster is not whether they will use AI, but how they will shape the use of AI on their terms and in line with their values,\" Mr Marks and Ms Amorelli wrote.\n\nThe email revealed that the ABC had selected US company Anthropic's Claude AI as its standard enterprise-wide AI tool, in addition to existing tools from Microsoft and an in-house chatbot.\n\nThe rollout would begin with a July pilot involving 100 \"AI Champions\" from across the organisation before being expanded in stages, they said.\n\nAn ABC spokesperson said the broadcaster's current uses of AI included third-party tools for production tasks such as transcription, and developing its own in-house AI, ABC Assist, for story research and production.\n\nThe ABC also pointed to a recent investigation using AI to help uncover patterns of negligence in cases of Indigenous deaths in custody as an example of how AI could help public-interest journalism.\n\nThe ABC is also recruiting for an AI Adoption Specialist and an Enterprise AI operations and assurance lead — roles that will help \"safe and effective adoption of enterprise AI tools\".\n\nSpecific tasks listed for the roles include running training and coaching, tracking AI adoption metrics, and building AI agents and integrations.\n\nAI turning radio into digital copy\n\nOne pilot program touted by ABC management is using ABC Assist to convert regional radio bulletins into digital articles.\n\nThe process will use the same local journalists who produce and present regional radio news to repurpose the copy into online news articles, with several checks along the way.\n\nThis includes review by a local editorial leader and sub-editor for a final check before publication.\n\nThe ABC said this showed how AI could bring journalism to a wider audience \"without significantly adding to the workload of the newsroom teams\".\n\nIt said ABC principles ensured it did not use AI to create \"end-to-end journalism\" or publish anything without human oversight.\n\nOne ABC staff member who took part in the pilot, granted anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said the AI only made minor changes to the radio copy, with suggested alterations.\n\nThe changes included turning written numbers to digits and condensing phrases, the staff member said, and so far had not included any updates that would have introduced factual errors into the copy.\n\nConcerns about AI's impact on staff\n\nThe new AI plans come after the ABC's bargaining negotiations in which rules and protections around the technology's use became a major sticking point.\n\nCassie Derrick, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) director of media, said AI tools, used well, could free journalists to focus on \"the human connection with sources, critical analysis and fact checking that makes quality journalism\".\n\nBut she said members at the ABC had expressed concerns AI could compromise job security and audience trust.\n\n\"ABC management needs to work closely with members to ensure the guardrails around the use of AI enhance journalism and don't undercut it,\" Ms Derrick said.\n\nShe said staff had won some commitments in recent negotiations, including consultation about AI use and guidelines to maintain journalistic ethics, but management had refused to commit to a provision that AI would not replace human workers.\n\nAustralians using AI, but not trusting it\n\nWhile trust in mainstream media is plummeting, the ABC remains Australia's most trusted news source, according to polling conducted for the media regulator and others.\n\nMeanwhile, Australians are largely distrusting towards AI, and polling suggests they are wary about its use in journalism.\n\nMichael Davis, a research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney's Centre for Media Transition, said the ABC had been more cautious than other Australian media companies in audience-facing uses of generative AI, particularly in news.\n\nNine, Seven and News Corp have all rolled out AI tools over the past three years assisting with the production of content used online.\n\nDr Davis said public broadcasters overseas had also been major sites of AI experimentation, and failing to capitalise on the technology's benefits presented a risk to the ABC and its obligation to serve Australians.\n\n\"There is going to be some benefit, even for a public broadcaster like the ABC,\" he said.\n\nDisclosure changes\n\nThe ABC is also changing how it discloses the technology's use.\n\nThe ABC's original principles on AI said it would inform audiences about how it was using AI technologies.\n\nThe current version says the ABC will be open with audiences when AI use \"could materially affect their understanding\" of content.\n\nAn ABC spokesperson said AI tools could be used in many ways that did not directly affect the end content, and the disclosure requirements reflected that.\n\nThe spokesperson said an AI-generated image used in news content would need to be disclosed, but using AI to research questions for an interview would not, because it would not directly affect the content presented to the audience.\n\nDr Davis said the change could be read as less transparent on its face but would be a more practical and workable policy in practice.\n\nHe said the ABC's detailed editorial guidance already drew fine distinctions about when AI use should be disclosed.\n\nHe said the updated principles appeared broader and more operational than the earlier version, rather than a retreat from responsibility.\n\nHowever, UNSW professor Deborah Lupton, who researches digital society and automated decision-making, said she was strongly opposed to generative AI and believed the ABC risked \"putting their standing at risk\" by embracing the technology.\n\nProfessor Lupton said participants in her research were worried about AI's effect on jobs, education, privacy, the environment and trust in information.\n\nThe ABC is conducting a town hall with staff about the changes on July 28.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/abc-new-ai-policies/106844364. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-11","numeric_id":11,"title":"'MrBeast model': Stefanovic's numbers reveal his broader strategy","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088","published_at":"2026-06-30T02:00:00+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Why is the former king of Australian breakfast television trading studio lights for ring lights?","text":"Why is the former king of Australian breakfast television trading studio lights for ring lights?","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1523,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:46+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"'MrBeast model': Stefanovic's numbers reveal his broader strategy\", ABC News, 2026-06-30, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, ['MrBeast model': Stefanovic's numbers reveal his broader strategy](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088) — ABC News — 2026-06-30","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088","full_text":"After more than a quarter of a century on TV, Karl Stefanovic's goodbye to his audience didn't go out on free-to-air television.\n\n\"I'm free,\" a stubbled Stefanovic said in a video posted to his podcast's YouTube channel last week.\n\nStefanovic's break-up with Nine followed months of speculation that he was looking to move on.\n\nBut Stefanovic doesn't appear to have plans to jump to another television network or mainstream media outlet.\n\nHe's going \"truly independent\", Stefanovic said, and will instead focus on his own video podcast, The Karl Stefanovic Show.\n\nSo, why is the former king of Australian breakfast television trading studio lights for ring lights?\n\nAfter all, hosting a commercial breakfast television program has long been one of the most sought-after jobs in Australian media. It's an instant ticket to fame, fortune and influence.\n\nIn light of his premature departure, Stefanovic's podcast looks less like a negotiating tactic or a life raft and more like a bet that the future of entertainment and media is online, not on television.\n\nBringing television to YouTube\n\nWhen Stefanovic started posting to his YouTube account in late January, the veteran television host brought the lessons he had learned over a career in broadcast media.\n\nTelevision is a mass audience medium. Since there's only a handful of broadcast television channels on free-to-air, every minute of air time needs to try to appeal to as large an audience as it can by hiring the biggest names, hitting the broadest topics and having a mix of different formats to keep audiences from changing channels.\n\nFrom the start, Stefanovic's online world tilted more conservative and culture war adjacent than his broadcast persona. He launched the podcast with an interview with Pauline Hanson, and almost exclusively interviewed right-wing politicians and influencers.\n\nBut other early guests included MMA fighter Alexander Volkanovski, celebrity chef Curtis Stone, Broncos coach Madge Maguire and radio host Kyle Sandilands with interviews about politics, their personal stories, travel and more.\n\nIn other words, much of the early material felt like breakfast television taken online: a variety of guests and topics aimed at a general audience.\n\nStefanovic's early YouTube efforts achieved modest results. The Karl Stefanovic Show quickly gained more than 50,000 subscribers in the first five weeks. But many of his early videos were only watched a few thousand times. One video with Stone talking about sleeping on couches barely cracked 1,000 views.\n\nThis suggests that Stefanovic's name recognition, his existing social media accounts promoting his new YouTube channel, and early mainstream media attention drew people to his new channel, but they weren't actually sticking around to watch videos, nor was he finding YouTube-native subscribers.\n\nSuccess on YouTube wasn't going to be as simple as doing what he'd always done.\n\nThe 'MrBeast' model\n\nAfter the first initial burst of attention and variable results, Stefanovic kept working away.\n\nThe Karl Stefanovic Show has published an average of more than 20 videos a month since it began.\n\nWhile the output amount was consistent, the type of content began to change. Stefanovic stopped doing broad celebrity interviews on a range of issues and honed in on a few topics.\n\nIn the show's first month, January, two videos were about immigration. In June, 14 of the 21 videos on The Karl Stefanovic Show touched on the topic. Politics and government failures became another major focus.\n\nThe way he spoke about them changed too. In a video posted last week, he called the passage of Labor's budget tax changes with the support of the Greens a \"dirty little deal\" that will \"kill the Australian dream\".\n\nThe titles of the videos became more emotive, more alarmed, more aggrieved. Early videos about Hanson had titles like Does Pauline Hanson Even Want To Be Prime Minister?.\n\nA few months later, the show's One Nation videos had titles like Australians Don't Trust Politicians Anymore and One Nation Senator: 'Australians Are Ready To Swing The Bat'.\n\nStefanovic has called himself \"Joe Bogan\" — a reference to successful podcaster Joe Rogan — but the show's strategy reminded QUT's Tim Graham of another popular YouTube personality.\n\nGraham says that the narrowing of the show's content suggests Stefanovic is optimising what he's producing to what performs best online.\n\n\"The extreme version of it … is what I call the MrBeast model,\" he said, referring to the world's most popular YouTube creator Jimmy Donaldson.\n\nWhile MrBeast is best known for simple, playful stunt videos such as I Filled My Brother's House With Slime and Bought Him A New One, the key to his dominance of YouTube has been his team's reportedly systematic, almost scientific approach to growing his channel with painstaking testing and iteration of everything in his videos.\n\nThis approach is necessary because of the sheer scale of YouTube's library. Billions of people go to YouTube each month to choose from hundreds of millions of hours of videos to watch. There are Big Mouth Billy Bass orchestras, tutorials on how to speak dead languages, and reviews of paper clips, all in the one place.\n\nTo help make sense of the hundreds of hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube relies heavily on algorithmic recommendations that suggest videos to people based on data it has about them, including their viewing habits and demographics. Someone who watches model train videos is more likely to be shown another model train video by YouTube, for example.\n\nThe culmination of these two factors — an enormous potential audience, and a platform that customises what's shown to you — means that YouTubers tend to be more successful when they stick to one specific niche of content, rather than trying to do a bit of everything.\n\nStefanovic's journey towards right-wing culture war topics isn't necessarily a revelation of the host's true views, Graham said, but the execution of a content-agnostic strategy based on iterating towards what performed best.\n\n\"It's all about asking: what is getting the most engagement? That's what you optimise for,\" Graham said.\n\nA global ceiling\n\nStefanovic's split with Nine has been one of the biggest stories in Australian media over the last week.\n\nA soft interview with the far-right anti-immigration figure Tommy Robinson, in which Stefanovic said that he \"admired\" him, kicked off a new wave of attention that appears to have been the straw that broke the camel's back.\n\nHis video announcing the divorce has been his most viewed so far, with more than 400,000 views in just a few days.\n\nBut Stefanovic's growing online audience isn't just a result of the influence of mainstream media mentions.\n\nAs The Karl Stefanovic Show pumped out videos on increasingly specific topics, tones and targets, its subscriber and view counts have steadily grown.\n\nWhen media attention came along, Stefanovic's channel benefited. Its channel has added a third of its 160,000 followers since last Wednesday. But it grew consistently outside of that, too.\n\nThis suggests that Stefanovic isn't just piggybacking off media mentions. His YouTube success has come from acting more like a YouTuber than a big time television host.\n\nAnd there's no reason to suggest this growth will stop anytime soon, particularly as Australians increasingly go online for their entertainment.\n\nThe decline of television\n\nAustralian television viewership has been declining since the mid-2010s. Now, the average national viewership for a program like Stefanovic's old show is in the low hundreds of thousands.\n\nBy comparison, YouTube has more than 2 billion logged-in monthly users. With access to a global audience, the hypothetical ceiling for The Karl Stefanovic Show's audience is in the tens, even hundreds of millions.\n\nEven with a hot start, Stefanovic's subscriber numbers still pale in comparison to people like Rogan or fellow television star-turned-YouTuber Piers Morgan with millions of subscribers.\n\nThe fact that Stefanovic spent last week in the UK filming videos suggests he's already eyeing an audience abroad.\n\nComparing online metrics to broadcast television numbers isn't comparing apples to apples; television numbers are the average number of people watching at any one moment, while YouTube views count the number of times people have watched at least 30 seconds of a video.\n\nBased on some back-of-the-envelope maths,The Karl Stefanovic Show is still a long way from reaching more people than his old show.\n\nCombining his momentum on the platform with the way that Australian viewing habits are shifting, that might soon change.\n\nBy comparison, Today's own foray into YouTube hasn't had the same success. Despite being 15 years old and having posted more than 900,000 videos, it has just more than 500,000 subscribers and most of its videos receive just a few thousand views at most.\n\nStefanovic's jump to online video showed a savviness and a willingness to experiment. His early success came from forgetting the lessons of a career in broadcasting in favour of acting like a YouTuber.\n\nThe conditions for his move were much larger than just Stefanovic's own circumstances. Mainstream media doesn't hold the sway it once did. New media is ascendant, powered by its enormous reach and its technological advantages.\n\nIf the former king of breakfast television is willing to walk away from the throne, it says a lot about where the power in media and entertainment now lies.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/karl-stefanovic-mainstream-media-mr-beast-joe-rogan/106848088. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-12","numeric_id":12,"title":"Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022","published_at":"2026-06-23T09:10:09+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Federal politician David Pocock has clashed with a senior Albanese government minister over a whistleblower claim that federal cabinet is considering plans to let AI companies train on Australian copyright material.","text":"Federal politician David Pocock has clashed with a senior Albanese government minister over a whistleblower claim that federal cabinet is considering plans to let AI companies train on Australian copyright material.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1148,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:47+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","media"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim\", ABC News, 2026-06-23, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022) — ABC News — 2026-06-23","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-23","title":"Top secret AI copyright reform plan leads to senior minister clash with David Pocock","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/top-secret-ai-copyright-reform-plan","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/23.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-06-23T08:02:21+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim","excerpt":"Hi, I just published: Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim Sorry I’m too knackered to say much more but here’s the story! CW","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"Federal politician David Pocock has clashed with a senior Albanese government minister over a whistleblower claim that federal cabinet is considering plans to let AI companies train on Australian copyright material.\n\nIndustry and Science Minister Tim Ayres accused Mr Pocock in Parliament of \"reckless speculation\" for airing the claim, while Mr Pocock said Mr Ayres did not deny or reject the claims.\n\nAt the centre of the stoush was Mr Pocock's allegation that the highest level of government is confidentially considering two competing proposals to change copyright policy for AI training.\n\nMr Pocock said one proposal being seriously considered would create a copyright \"carve-out\" for AI companies tied to billions of dollars of data centre investment and hundreds of millions of dollars annually for a creative fund.\n\nThe other submission would instead expand licensing agreements that would clear the way for AI companies to legally use Australian material to train their proprietary technology.\n\nMr Pocock told the ABC that a \"credible source\" had provided detailed information to his office about the high-level plans.\n\n\"One cabinet submission would effectively allow AI companies to text and data-mine Australian creatives' work in return for a multi-billion data centre investment and expedited approvals,\" he said.\n\nThe ABC has not independently verified the whistleblower's identity, the existence of the cabinet submissions, or the contents of the claim described by Senator Pocock's office.\n\nSpokespersons for Senator Ayres and Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton both called the claims \"Inaccurate\".\n\n\"The government has ruled out a text and data mining exception. Our position has not changed,\" both said.\n\nA spokesperson for Attorney-General Michelle Rowland also denied a plan to weaken copyright protection for AI training.\n\n\"We are committed to ensuring that Australia has a fit-for-purpose copyright framework that protects and supports Australia's creative and media industries while unlocking AI innovation.\"\n\nThe offices of Home Affairs and Arts Minister Tony Burke was contacted for comment.\n\nThe government has made repeated commitments that copyright laws would not be watered down in any deal with AI companies since it ruled out a carve-out in October last year.\n\nPocock and Ayres face off over whistleblower copyright claims\n\nIn Question Time on Tuesday, Senator Pocock asked Mr Ayres to rule out any change that would allow AI companies to use Australian creatives' work.\n\n\"Minister, is it still the case that the government has no plans to allow AI companies to mine Australian creatives' data, either via some form of carve out, an extension to the licensing system or other means?\" Mr Pocock asked.\n\nHe then asked whether the government was considering competing proposals tied to a creative arts fund, multi-billion-dollar data centre investment and expedited approvals.\n\nMr Pocock asked whether any element of that claim was correct, and whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese intended to announce a plan on or around July 15, or if the government could \"categorically rule out\" contemplating any change.\n\nMy Ayres responded saying the federal government would not undermine copyright protections in Australia, and that it was in Australia's interests to \"secure as much of the technology stack\" as possible.\n\n\"It is not this government's view that we should just be a cork bobbing on the ocean of other people's technology, and a customer at the long end of technology supply chains,\" he said.\n\nMr Ayres accused Mr Pocock of \"reckless speculation\" in a radio interview on Monday that also mentioned whistleblower claims.\n\nLater, Mr Pocock returned to speak in the Senate to say Mr Ayres' answer did not rule out the whistleblower's claims.\n\n\"The minister accused me of reckless speculation, but, rather curiously, could not simply rule out the speculation,\" he said.\n\nCreative sector warns of cost to artists\n\nThe political stoush follows months of pressure from technology companies and data centre operators, who argue Australia's copyright system makes it harder to invest in local AI infrastructure.\n\nAI systems are widely reported to be built on vast amounts of data, including copyright material that has not been licensed.\n\nA text and data mining exemption would allow certain copying and analysis of that material without negotiating individual licences in the usual way.\n\nA licensing extension would be a different model because it would preserve some form of payment or permission system. Schools, universities and TAFEs have a similar licensing agreement to let them use books, websites, news articles and other content in return without having to individually negotiate with each rights holder.\n\nThe practical difference is whether AI companies can use books, songs, journalism, images and other works to train or test systems without dealing directly with creators and rights holders\n\nARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd told the ABC the creative industries would be gravely concerned if the government was considering reversing its previous rejection of a text and data mining exception.\n\nKnow more about how Australia is regulating AI? Email Cam Wilson on wilson.cameron@abc.net.au or his secure email cmwlsn@protonmail.com.\n\n\"The creative and media industries have not been consulted on such a proposal and would vehemently oppose such a radical intervention into a free market that is burgeoning with commercial opportunity for Australian creators,\" Ms Herd said.\n\nUniversity of Sydney law professor Kimberlee Weatherall said Australian copyright law was out of date, but any fund raised major questions about who would actually be paid.\n\n\"If it is about paying copyright owners, the immediate question is: what about human creators?\" Professor Weatherall said.\n\nShe said there would also be questions about whether creators could refuse to have their work used, including Indigenous creators and groups who may want culturally significant material to be off limits.\n\nUNSW law professor Kathy Bowrey said the existing system was not fit for purpose, but the case for tying copyright change to data centres should be treated sceptically.\n\n\"The argument that we need this in order to operate data centres in Australia is also rubbish,\" Professor Bowrey said.\n\n\"What is the work that the exception is supposed to do, as opposed to a licence?\" she said.\n\nThe copyright dispute has escalated\n\nIn October last year, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland declared that the government would not grant a copyright exemption for AI training.\n\nSince then, tech industry figures have continued to argue the existing law makes it too difficult to train AI systems in Australia.\n\nThis month, Atlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar told The Australian Financial Review AI Summit that urgent copyright reform was needed to secure AI investment.\n\nMr Farquhar said AI companies would need to \"cut a deal with every single recording artist in the entire world\" to comply with Australia copyright law, and this complexity was scaring away investment.\n\nMs Rowland reiterated her stance in May.\n\n\"The Albanese government is committed to supporting Australia's creative sector and has been clear for some time that there are no plans to weaken copyright protections when it comes to AI,\" she told the ABC.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ai-australian-copyright-david-pocock-claims/106832022. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-23","numeric_id":23,"title":"Top secret AI copyright reform plan leads to senior minister clash with David Pocock","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/top-secret-ai-copyright-reform-plan","published_at":"2026-06-23T08:02:21+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"At the centre is a whistleblower claim that federal cabinet is confidentially considering two competing proposals to let AI companies train on Australian copyright material.","text":"Hi,\n\nI just published: Senior Albanese minister clashes with Pocock over top-secret AI copyright claim\n\nSorry I’m too knackered to say much more but here’s the story!\n\nCW","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Top secret AI copyright reform plan leads to senior minister clash with David Pocock\", webcam, 2026-06-23, https://webcam.substack.com/p/top-secret-ai-copyright-reform-plan","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Top secret AI copyright reform plan leads to senior minister clash with David Pocock](https://webcam.substack.com/p/top-secret-ai-copyright-reform-plan) — webcam — 2026-06-23","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/top-secret-ai-copyright-reform-plan"},{"id":"camfeed-13","numeric_id":13,"title":"Australia's AI access cut after Trump order","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456","published_at":"2026-06-13T05:18:27+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"The US government restrictions cite national security concerns over the AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5.","text":"The US government restrictions cite national security concerns over the AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":762,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:48+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Australia's AI access cut after Trump order\", ABC News, 2026-06-13, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Australia's AI access cut after Trump order](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456) — ABC News — 2026-06-13","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456","full_text":"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has taken its most advanced AI models offline after it was ordered by the US government to suspend access for all foreign nationals.\n\nThis comes after the company recently gave Australian companies and individuals access to these new models, which it initially said were \"too dangerous\" for public release.\n\nOn Saturday morning, Australian time, Anthropic published a blog confirming reports that it had received an export control directive from the Trump administration to suspend access for foreign nationals to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models.\n\nIn a statement, Anthropic said the US government has not provided details for its \"national security concern\", but it understands the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing its models' safeguards.\n\nThe company voluntarily places guardrails around the use of its AI models to thwart their use in cyber attacks, the creation of bioweapons and other harmful activities.\n\n\"The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,\" Anthropic said.\n\n\"Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.\"\n\nAnthropic added that it believed there was a \"misunderstanding\" and that it was working to restore access to the models as soon as possible.\n\nThe geopolitics of access to AI\n\nThe sudden shutdown lands in the middle of a broader fight over who gets access to the world's most powerful AI systems.\n\nLast month, the ABC reported that access to frontier models had become part of Australia's discussions with Anthropic and other major technology companies, as the federal government sought to lure more AI investment into the country.\n\nEarlier this month, an Anthropic spokeswoman confirmed Australian organisations would be included in an expanded Mythos access program, although the company declined to name specific companies or government agencies.\n\nAustralian AI start-up monō ai founder David Hyman said he was using one of Anthropic's new models when it got pulled offline.\n\n\"Was mid-build […] and got an error I've never seen before. 'Model not found',\" he said.\n\nThis week, Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei argued that governments should have stronger powers over the release of dangerous AI systems.\n\nIn a blog post, Mr Amodei said frontier AI models should be subject to technical testing and auditing, and that governments should be able to block or reverse the release of a model if it presented unacceptable public safety risks.\n\nThe Trump administration has already been in conflict with Anthropic.\n\nIn March, the Department of War confirmed the company had been designated a supply-chain risk to America's national security, a decision the company is challenging in court.\n\nAustralian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Fergus Ryan said that Australia should still get access to models that the US wishes to restrict for national security reasons.\n\n\"If Washington now sees frontier AI models as strategic capabilities, it needs an allied-access regime for Five Eyes partners, not a one-size-fits-all foreign exclusion rule,\" he said.\n\nDepartment of Home Affairs and the office of Minister Tony Bourke have been contacted for comment.\n\nOpenAI under investigation\n\nThe ChatGPT maker was served with a subpoena on Friday local time seeking documents related to a wide range of its activities and the impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, and the handling of consumer and health data, the source said.\n\nThe subpoena, sent by New York's attorney general, also seeks information on activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models and internal company policies, the source added.\n\nThe probe represents the latest legal challenge for IPO-bound OpenAI, which is being sued by Florida for allegedly misrepresenting the safety of its ChatGPT platform.\n\nThe source declined to be identified while discussing the investigation, which has not been publicly announced.\n\nAn OpenAI spokesperson said: \"AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way.\n\n\"We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend to engage constructively with their offices.\"\n\nThe Florida lawsuit, the first by a US state, claims the platform has harmed children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm and addicting young users.\n\nA Canadian mother also sued OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman in US court on Thursday, alleging ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to kill herself.\n\nOpenAI said last week it had confidentially filed for a US IPO that a source said could come as early as September and value the company at up to $US1 trillion ($1.4 trillion).\n\nABC/Wires","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-13/anthropic-ordered-to-halt-foreign-access-to-ai-models/106794456. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-24","numeric_id":24,"title":"Dozens of Australian government agencies failed first test at self-policing AI use","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/dozens-of-australian-government-agencies","published_at":"2026-06-12T06:27:17+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"The early stumbles shows the challenge of leaving AI rule-making to each department by themselves","text":"Hi!\n\nI just published: Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy\n\nA Friday treat off the back of the Four Corners report earlier this week about Australia’s approach to rules around AI.\n\nAfter last year’s election, the federal government did a U-turn and decided against EU style regulation with a central AI Act and broad rules for its use.\n\nInstead, it tasked all the government department and agencies with setting their own rules for AI.\n\nBut around the same time, many of these agencies showed the flaws of this approach.\n\nDozens of them failed at their first test of self-policing their own use by missing deadlines for disclosing how they use AI or who is responsible.\n\nWhile they’ve remedied this issue, it’s notable because the shows the potential issues with adding another issue to the already full plates of these government agencies — particularly for an issue that’s as complicated and fast moving as AI!\n\nThanks, CW\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Dozens of Australian government agencies failed first test at self-policing AI use\", webcam, 2026-06-12, https://webcam.substack.com/p/dozens-of-australian-government-agencies","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Dozens of Australian government agencies failed first test at self-policing AI use](https://webcam.substack.com/p/dozens-of-australian-government-agencies) — webcam — 2026-06-12","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/dozens-of-australian-government-agencies"},{"id":"camfeed-14","numeric_id":14,"title":"Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344","published_at":"2026-06-12T03:25:57+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"The ABC can reveal dozens of federal agencies missed mandatory deadlines to disclose how they are currently using AI.","text":"The ABC can reveal dozens of federal agencies missed mandatory deadlines to disclose how they are currently using AI.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1062,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:48+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy\", ABC News, 2026-06-12, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344) — ABC News — 2026-06-12","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-24","title":"Dozens of Australian government agencies failed first test at self-policing AI use","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/dozens-of-australian-government-agencies","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/24.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-06-12T06:27:17+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy","excerpt":"Hi! I just published: Government agencies fail first hurdle under AI self-reporting policy A Friday treat off the back of the Four Corners report earlier this week about Australia’s approach to rules around AI. After last year’s election, the federal government did a U-turn and...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"Dozens of government bodies have failed the first test of policing their own use of AI, after Australia backed away from stricter European-style AI rules in favour of relying on existing regulators and agencies.\n\nLast year, the federal government opted for a softer model for regulating artificial intelligence than the European-style approach of a single AI law with binding rules about high-risk AI.\n\nThe federal government said existing laws would suffice but tasked each agency with policing their own use of AI and, subsequently, regulating their own industries' use of the new technology.\n\nBut documents tabled in the Senate by the agency responsible for technology across government, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), showed the challenge of these approaches.\n\nMore than half of the government agencies checked by the DTA had not met the first transparency deadline for disclosing how they use artificial intelligence, according to documents tabled in parliament.\n\nIndependent senator Fatima Payman, who pursued the issue through Senate estimates, said the records proved agencies were not even meeting their basic obligations.\n\n\"If the government can't even regulate its own AI use, how can Australians expect it to regulate AI in the private sector, which is reshaping the workplace for millions of Australians?\" Senator Payman told the ABC.\n\nDTA deputy CEO Lucy Poole acknowledged the challenge of regulating a fast-moving technology.\n\n\"The rate of change AI presents to the Australian Public Service means we need to work flexibly and considerately to ensure it is applied meaningfully and responsibly where appropriate,\" Ms Poole said.\n\nKnow more about how Australia is regulating AI? Email Cam Wilson on wilson.cameron@abc.net.au or his secure email cmwlsn@protonmail.com.\n\nMost government agencies missed AI disclosure deadline\n\nBefore the government's u-turn following the 2025 federal election, the DTA set a policy requiring government agencies to share some basic information about how they were using AI.\n\nThe DTA's use of AI in government policy was intended to build trust by being transparent.\n\nThose transparency statements were meant to tell the public whether an agency was using AI, where it was being used, what safeguards applied, and whether people could be directly affected by automated systems.\n\nBut by 2pm on February 28, 2025 — a deadline set six months after the policy came into effect — only 40 of 92 mandated agencies had told the DTA they had done so, DTA records show.\n\nFollowing the publication of this article, the DTA provided additional documentation showing that its subsequent compliance sweep of the agencies' websites confirmed only 13 were not compliant.\n\nIn addition, the DTA later told the Senate that 30 of 92 mandated agencies had failed to meet another new requirement to nominate someone from the agency who was accountable for the use of AI by its earlier deadline in November 2024.\n\nLate, unaware and emails sent to spam\n\nSome agencies were late. Others said they were unaware of the requirement or later corrected answers to Senate questions.\n\nIn one case, the Commonwealth Grants Commission initially gave evidence that it had met both deadlines before later acknowledging it hadn't.\n\nAnother agency, the National Competition Council, told a Senate estimates hearing it had not published its AI transparency statement by February 2025 because it was unaware of the deadline.\n\nIt later said it was compliant \"by extension\" because it relied on the ACCC for information technology services, and the ACCC had published its own statement on time.\n\nThe Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA) was initially treated as non-compliant by the DTA, but later correspondence showed the agency had emailed its accountable official details on December 5, 2024.\n\nOTA's email had been caught in DTA's spam filter. The DTA later corrected the record and said that OTA had complied.\n\nUniversity of Sydney law professor Kim Weatherall said this first attempt at transparency statements had shown the challenges of assigning the responsibility to each of the agencies.\n\n\"It's just another big thing to add to their plate,\" Professor Weatherall said.\n\nShe said the first set of transparency disclosures were a \"mixed bag\".\n\nSome were very detailed, she said, while others provided scant information about what types of AI they were using or what rules they had around its use.\n\nBut she cautioned against assuming a rough first go at transparency statements meant that government agencies weren't doing a good job of managing AI use within their departments.\n\n\"It's entirely possible they're doing good work internally while also dealing with a rapidly changing landscape,\" Professor Weatherall said.\n\nGovernment ramps up AI expectations\n\nThe DTA now says all 94 agencies have met their obligations around AI transparency and appointing an accountable official.\n\n\"As this was a new policy, the DTA worked closely with mandated agencies to ensure they understood their requirements and delivered on the expected outcomes,\" Ms Poole said.\n\nIt has also moved to make the AI transparency statements easier to find.\n\nPreviously, Australians had to search individual agency websites to compare statements about government AI use. Now, the DTA has created a central register of AI transparency statements.\n\n\"We will continue to iterate the register to improve the user experience and detail included,\" Ms Poole said.\n\nGovernment agencies have also been given new responsibilities for use of AI in government.\n\nOn top of the transparency statements, government agencies must develop a strategic position on AI adoption, keep internal registers of AI use cases, train staff in responsible AI use, and assess the potential impact of their use of AI.\n\nThe government's AI plan for the public service also expects every agency to appoint a chief AI officer in 2026.\n\nIt is a new role distinct from the accountable official covering the agency's compliance, and AI officers are tasked with driving adoption of AI within agencies.\n\nProfessor Weatherall said the framework still had a structural weakness because the DTA was not an enforcement body.\n\n\"They're trying to do the right thing — producing standards and guidance — but they're not a regulator,\" she said.\n\n\"They don't have enforcement powers.\"\n\nSenator Payman said the agency compliance problems raised questions about the government's ability to regulate AI outside the public service.\n\n\"Numerous agencies have failed to meet basic AI transparency requirements, some of them months after they were required to,\" she said.\n\n\"There's no penalty for agencies who don't comply, so why would they?\"\n\nFinance Minister Katy Gallagher's office did not respond to a request for comment.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/government-agencies-miss-ai-transparency-test/106789344. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-25","numeric_id":25,"title":"As Elon Musk's SpaceX goes public, government officials are raising the alarm about Starlink's risks to Australia","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/as-elon-musks-spacex-goes-public","published_at":"2026-06-11T00:10:49+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Australia is coming to terms with the challenges of making essential communication infrastructure reliant on a private, foreign provider run by the world's richest man.","text":"Hi!\n\nI just published As Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes public, Australian government officials are flagging Starlink’s risks .\n\nLater this week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will go public.\n\nNaturally, there will be a lot of attention on how it could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire, or on whether the business fundamentals of SpaceX justify the valuation.\n\nWhat I’m interested in is a different question: what will Musk do with the tens of billions of dollars raised in the float?\n\nThis story looks at how the Australian government is privately lagging the risks that Starlink presents to Australia — and how those risks could grow if SpaceX is even better resourced and Musk is even more insulated from consequences.\n\nStarlink is clearly a very useful business. Its ability to bypass government control was seen as a positive when people in Iran used it to stay in contact with the outside world during internet blackouts. But that same capability creates challenges for Australia’s ability to enforce laws and rules that govern how people use the internet and connect with each other. That is particularly important given Musk’s alleged history of using this capability to cut off or restrict service at his own whim, and his clashes with Australia and other Western governments that have chosen to regulate his companies.\n\nThanks, CW\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"As Elon Musk's SpaceX goes public, government officials are raising the alarm about Starlink's risks to Australia\", webcam, 2026-06-11, https://webcam.substack.com/p/as-elon-musks-spacex-goes-public","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [As Elon Musk's SpaceX goes public, government officials are raising the alarm about Starlink's risks to Australia](https://webcam.substack.com/p/as-elon-musks-spacex-goes-public) — webcam — 2026-06-11","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/as-elon-musks-spacex-goes-public"},{"id":"camfeed-15","numeric_id":15,"title":"Government flags risk of relying on Elon Musk's SpaceX and Starlink","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898","published_at":"2026-06-10T19:39:07+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"As tens of thousands of Australians line up to buy shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX blockbuster public offering, Australian government officials are privately flagging the risks posed by the country's growing reliance on its satellite internet service, Starlink.","text":"As tens of thousands of Australians line up to buy shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX blockbuster public offering, Australian government officials are privately flagging the risks posed by the country's growing reliance on its satellite internet service, Starlink.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1254,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:49+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Government flags risk of relying on Elon Musk's SpaceX and Starlink\", ABC News, 2026-06-11, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Government flags risk of relying on Elon Musk's SpaceX and Starlink](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898) — ABC News — 2026-06-11","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-25","title":"As Elon Musk's SpaceX goes public, government officials are raising the alarm about Starlink's risks to Australia","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/as-elon-musks-spacex-goes-public","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/25.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-06-11T00:10:49+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Government flags risk of relying on Elon Musk's SpaceX and Starlink","excerpt":"Hi! I just published As Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes public, Australian government officials are flagging Starlink’s risks . Later this week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will go public. Naturally, there will be a lot of attention on how it could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire, or on...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"As tens of thousands of Australians line up to buy shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX blockbuster public offering, Australian government officials are privately flagging the risks of the country's growing reliance on its satellite internet service, Starlink.\n\nThese concerns were made explicit in a little-noticed official spy agency notice describing satellite internet providers as a serious challenge to Australia's ability to enforce its own laws and protect itself.\n\nThe satellite and artificial intelligence company has pitched prospective buyers on a business plan to build out a global — and one day interplanetary — phone and internet network.\n\nThere were about 200,000 Australians who were Starlink customers, according to a 2025 government estimate.\n\nSince then, major telcos Telstra and Optus have signed deals with SpaceX to let their customers use its satellite phone services when they are out of traditional phone coverage.\n\nNow, documents obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws show government officials have been assessing the risk of having essential communications reliant on a privately owned, foreign satellite network that is controlled by the world's richest man.\n\nJoel Lisk, a space law lecturer at Flinders University, said Australia had legal mechanisms to regulate Starlink, but the practical question was how much leverage the country had over satellites in orbit.\n\n\"There's the inherent problem: How do you stop someone from doing it?\" Dr Lisk said.\n\nSpaceX did not respond to questions from the ABC.\n\nSatellite operators like SpaceX have 'significant control'\n\nAn internal presentation prepared by the Department of Home Affairs' Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre in May 2025 laid out the \"security considerations\" for low-Earth-orbit satellite communications services like Starlink.\n\nThe internal presentation acknowledged that satellite phone and internet communications services played an important role in Australia, particularly in regional and remote areas.\n\nThe presentation also had a blunt warning specifically about the federal government not having direct control of Starlink because it was not physically based in Australia.\n\nOne slide flagged \"availability risks due to the offshore nature of Starlink\".\n\nHome Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nThe federal government has awarded more than a dozen contracts worth at least $7.13 million, including services for the Department of Defence and Australian Electoral Commission.\n\nThis total amount grows to more than $50 million when it includes state government contracts, most significantly a $41 million contract with the NSW Rural Fire Service for Starlink installations in thousands of its vehicles.\n\nAnother government document, a public advisory note by the Australian Signals Directorate, which was published in March but garnered little attention, raised the alarm about the risks of relying on satellite internet.\n\nThe note said the private operators of satellite services had \"significant\" control over the networks.\n\n\"This influence may exceed the regulatory capacity of individual nations, raising concerns about sovereignty and the protection of national interests,\" the note said.\n\nWho regulates SpaceX?\n\nStarlink and SpaceX are currently covered by overlapping Australian regulations.\n\nThe Home Affairs presentation identified that Starlink was considered a critical asset under Australia's critical infrastructure law.\n\nThis designation comes with some legal requirements, including protecting itself from risks that would hurt its operation and reporting its ownership details.\n\nIt is also a licensed telecommunication carrier which comes under the purview of the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), Dr Lisk said.\n\nBut he said the interaction between the different regulatory regimes was difficult.\n\nDr Lisk said the issue was not unique to Australia.\n\n\"The regulation of large-scale satellite systems is a genuine area of regulatory concern, with regulators across the world still grappling with the speed at which the technology is evolving,\" he said.\n\n'That's not possible because our licences don't extend into space'\n\nTelstra and SpaceX's attempts to get ACMA's sign-off on their agreement show how complicated this can be.\n\nIn correspondence released under FOI, SpaceX told ACMA it needed evidence from a regulator that it was allowed to use Telstra's spectrum from low-Earth orbit.\n\n\"Of course, that's not possible because our licences don't extend into space,\" the Telstra representative wrote.\n\nTelstra told the ABC that its licence covered the Australian continent and coastline up to the stratosphere.\n\nBeyond that, in the altitude where SpaceX's Starlink operates, the spectrum is governed by international treaties administered by the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector.\n\nSo, ACMA could not give SpaceX official approval to use Telstra's spectrum up there, despite the agreement between the two parties. ACMA did not respond by deadline.\n\n\"Our partnership is operating in full compliance with domestic and international regulations and treaties,\" Telstra said.\n\nThat does not mean Starlink is operating unlawfully, only that this service operates outside the typical, ordinary domestic controls people expect from a national telecommunications network.\n\nTelstra told the ABC it had ensured the interests of its customers, the Australian people and compliance with relevant rules were protected.\n\nAsked whether it could direct SpaceX to stop, modify or limit satellite transmissions using Telstra spectrum over Australia if there was a technical, security or regulatory concern, Telstra said: \"Yes.\"\n\nMusk and Starlink's familiarity with Australian regulators\n\nBoth Starlink and Mr Musk have already had run-ins with Australian regulators.\n\nIn May 2025, ACMA found that Starlink had repeatedly failed to meet its obligations as a telco provider to report the number of complaints it had received. Starlink told ACMA the failure was an administrative oversight.\n\nACMA documents also show Starlink had previously been issued a direction to comply in August 2023, after an investigation found it had breached advertising rules for special promotions.\n\nIn both cases, Starlink cooperated with ACMA when directed.\n\nMr Musk has also shown he is willing to fight Australian regulators personally, including getting involved with his social media company X's dispute with the eSafety commissioner over orders to remove or hide violent footage from the Sydney church stabbing.\n\nBoth Starlink and Mr Musk have also been accused of limiting access to their services in the past.\n\nReuters reported in July 2025 that Mr Musk allegedly ordered Starlink satellite coverage shut down over part of Ukraine's Kherson region during a 2022 counteroffensive.\n\nThe report said the blackout disrupted Ukrainian communications, drones and artillery coordination as forces tried to encircle Russian troops near Beryslav.\n\nMr Musk has denied that he turned off Starlink for Ukraine, and the circumstances of Starlink's military use remain contested.\n\nThe risk that Mr Musk could consider doing the same to Australia is not a thought experiment. Earlier this year, SpaceX threatened to pull its service from Australia if it was forced to bid for spectrum rights.\n\n\"[The spectrum uncertainty meant] we're not even sure we're going to be able to deploy in Australia,\" SpaceX vice-president David Goldman told a Senate inquiry in April, according to the Australian Financial Review.\n\nSpaceX is set to be publicly floated on the NASDAQ on June 12. For the first time, Australian retail investors will be able to directly buy shares in a US public offering.\n\nThis float is expected to make Mr Musk the world's first-ever trillionaire while leaving him still in control of the public company due to its unusual share structure.\n\nThe chance that the world's richest man with complete control over SpaceX could withhold Starlink from Australia is part of the complicated equation facing politicians tasked with regulating SpaceX and Starlink, Dr Lisk said.\n\n\"All jurisdictions have had to contend with this: Do we authorise SpaceX to broadcast into our jurisdiction? If we say no, what are the consequences? Could they do it anyway? Or alternatively, are we just going to disadvantage our own citizens?\"","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-16","numeric_id":16,"title":"Thirteen government agencies embroiled in potential data breach","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442","published_at":"2026-06-09T21:14:45+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Thirteen government agencies are now embroiled in an expanding scandal involving potential data breaches prompting calls for an urgent audit amid concerns over national security.","text":"Thirteen government agencies are now embroiled in an expanding scandal involving potential data breaches prompting calls for an urgent audit amid concerns over national security.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1108,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:49+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Thirteen government agencies embroiled in potential data breach\", ABC News, 2026-06-10, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Thirteen government agencies embroiled in potential data breach](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442) — ABC News — 2026-06-10","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442","full_text":"Thirteen government agencies are now embroiled in an expanding scandal involving potential data breaches, prompting calls for an urgent audit amid concerns over national security.\n\nEarlier this year, embattled transcription company VIQ Solutions breached its Commonwealth contract with the Federal Court by allowing highly sensitive court files to be accessed offshore in India.\n\nThe company is now being wound down and was removed from AusTender as an approved supplier by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) on March 19.\n\nHowever, 13 government agencies have used VIQ Solutions since 2019, including the Department of Defence, Services Australia, the ATO and even the Attorney-General's Department, broadening the risk of potential breaches.\n\nThe Office of the Special Investigator (OSI), the agency responsible for investigating war crimes in Afghanistan, signed a new contract with VIQ on April 2, which was for commencement on April 8, despite VIQ going into administration and being removed from AusTender in March.\n\nIn a statement, the OSI said it had engaged VIQ Solutions to provide court audio recordings but had not made any payments or received any services from the company.\n\n\"The OSI established a limited tender procurement directly with VIQ Solutions to provide audio recordings. The OSI has not made any payments to or received any services from the supplier,\" it said.\n\nFormer New South Wales Court of Appeals judge and chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, Anthony Whealy KC, said it was particularly concerning \"in light of current investigations and trials\" being undertaken by the OSI.\n\n\"This is a very worrying development and it's important we get a full picture of what services have been provided by VIQ to the various government agencies involved,\" he said.\n\n\"Overall, this issue demonstrates there's a weakness in our processes and protocols … How can one company so expose all these departments to a security risk?\"\n\nMr Whealy said an audit was necessary and it was important that government agencies handled the matter with \"absolute honesty and accountability\".\n\n'An abdication of responsibility'\n\nLast week, the federal courts told Senate estimates that litigants in at least 146 court matters were potentially caught up in the alleged data breach.\n\nHowever, the ABC has sighted documents that show thousands of court files were accessed by e24 Technologies, a company based in Chennai, India, that specialises in voice-to-text technology.\n\nThe alleged breach is the subject of a formal complaint with the privacy commissioner in Canada, where VIQ's parent company is based, and is being probed by Australia's information commissioner.\n\nShadow Attorney-General Michaela Cash has called for an urgent \"forensic audit\".\n\n\"Australians deserve to know whether the integrity of sensitive government proceedings has been compromised,\" she said.\n\n\"The government cannot simply leave it to the federal courts to investigate and then report back to everyone else. That is an abdication of responsibility.\n\n\"The attorney-general should be coordinating a whole-of-government response … to establish definitively what data was accessed, by whom, and what was done with the data.\n\n\"If data underpinning war crimes prosecutions or national security proceedings have been accessed by unvetted overseas workers, that is more than a simple data breach — it is a potential matter of national security.\n\n\"The government owes the public a full and urgent account of what it knows and what it is doing about it.\"\n\nA spokesperson for the government told the ABC it was \"carefully monitoring the situation\".\n\n\"The government has clear contractual requirements for all service providers in relation to national security, privacy and confidentiality,\" they said in a statement.\n\n\"Any breach or alleged breach of these contractual obligations are taken very seriously by the agencies who are responsible for those contracts.\"\n\nThe Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) confirmed it had used VIQ for a \"limited number of transcription matters\".\n\n\"The OAIC is reviewing this engagement in light of the allegations reported, including seeking assurances about how any OAIC material was handled, stored and accessed,\" a spokesperson said in a statement.\n\n\"The OAIC is in the early stages of making preliminary inquiries in relation to the reported breach and any potential related contraventions of the Privacy Act.\"\n\nGreens senator David Shoebridge, who sits on the legal and constitutional affairs committee, said the attorney-general could \"no longer hide\" from the growing scandal.\n\n\"We know data has been compromised in the federal and family courts and we have no reason to think it's limited to that. This company reaches right across the federal bureaucracies,\" he said.\n\nSenator Shoebridge said it was particularly concerning that the OSI had taken on a contract with VIQ without the \"proper checks and balances\".\n\n\"This is a very significant failure from OSI, who are dealing with some of the most critical national security evidence, evidence of potential war crimes, evidence of the Australian Defence Force.\n\n\"A simple Google search should have sent warning lights going off before a contract was signed. It appears none of that happened.\"\n\nGovernment contracts with VIQ total more than $20 million. There are still seven current contracts with the company, with four of them scheduled to finish on June 29 this year.\n\nThe ABC contacted every government agency connected to VIQ for a response.\n\nA spokesperson for the ATO said it engaged transcription providers for \"services associated with witness and evidence interviews\".\n\n\"In March 2025, the ATO took appropriate steps to ensure information provided to VIQ Solutions in the delivery of transcript services had not been subject to unauthorised access or security breaches, and that ATO transcripts and audit files would only be produced and stored in Australia,\" the spokesperson said in a statement.\n\n\"The ATO has not engaged VIQ Solutions Pty Ltd for transcription services since March 2025.\"\n\nA spokesperson for ASIC said it had, \"no cause to believe the use of VIQ Solutions led to any incident involving ASIC data\".\n\nA spokesperson for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission said it had, \"taken appropriate action to identify and address any risks, including ceasing engagement of VIQ Solutions\".\n\nA spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency said it, \"does not have a current contract with VIQ Solutions\".\n\nThe departments and courts that used VIQ Solutions:\n\nThe Attorney-General's Department\n\nThe Australian Tax Office\n\nThe Australian Securities and Investment Commission\n\nThe Department of Defence\n\nThe Office of the Special Investigator\n\nServices Australia\n\nThe Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission\n\nFuture Fund Management Agency\n\nNational Emergency Management Agency\n\nThe Fair Work Commission\n\nThe Office of the Australian Information Commissioner\n\nPro Services Review\n\nThe Federal Court of Australia\n\nThe Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia\n\nThe South Australian Employment Tribunal\n\nWest Australia Department of Justice\n\nQueensland Department of Justice\n\nNSW courts and tribunals\n\nVictorian courts and tribunals","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-10/viq-solutions-contracts-ato-special-investigator-defence/106771442. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-17","numeric_id":17,"title":"What's got the pope and most Australians worried? This hyped new technology","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098","published_at":"2026-06-04T02:06:10+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Most Australians appear to distrust and dislike artificial intelligence despite using technology more than people in other countries.","text":"Most Australians appear to distrust and dislike artificial intelligence despite using technology more than people in other countries.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1145,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:51+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"What's got the pope and most Australians worried? This hyped new technology\", ABC News, 2026-06-04, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [What's got the pope and most Australians worried? This hyped new technology](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098) — ABC News — 2026-06-04","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-26","title":"What do the pope and most Australians have in common?","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/what-do-the-pope-and-most-australians","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/26.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-06-04T00:19:42+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: What's got the pope and most Australians worried? This hyped new technology","excerpt":"Hello! I just published: What do the pope and most Australians have in common? Neither trust AI companies As I get a feel for this beat, one thing has been coming up time and time again. I hear it from companies, politicians, academics, activists. AI is pretty unpopular. Obvious...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"It's not often that the pope, college students and Australians agree.\n\nOne topic that has brought these unusual bedfellows roughly onto the same page is artificial intelligence.\n\nLast week, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, a 43,000-word plea to address the threats posed by AI.\n\nAmerican college students have been expressing their concerns by booing esteemed commencement speakers who mention the new technology (the exception that proves the rule was Australian comedian Ronny Chieng, who was greeted with cheers for his message \"F*** AI\" at a Harvard ceremony).\n\nIt's not just a set of outlier students and pontiffs, either. Most Australians do not have particularly fond feelings towards the new technology, polling shows.\n\nAustralians dislike and distrust AI\n\nAustralians have the equal most negative views towards AI in the world, according to an EY survey of people from 23 countries.\n\nAlmost half of Australians surveyed for the Minderoo Foundation say the risks outweigh the benefits, compared with about a third who believe the opposite.\n\nOnly 4 per cent of Australians say they trust their private information with AI companies, according to a new survey done by Australia's Office of the Information Commissioner.\n\nResearch from the Tech Policy Design Institute found that just 1 per cent of Australians say they have complete trust that AI will be used responsibly.\n\nThis feeling is manifesting in real-world politics. Just a few years ago, the construction of data centres serving AI and other tech services was mostly uncontroversial and rarely newsworthy.\n\nNow, residents from places like Lane Cove in Sydney and West Footscray in Melbourne are opposing building \"AI factories\" in their areas. Last month, a developer pulled a proposal to build a data centre near Perth, citing community opposition.\n\nIt's a big enough problem that this week, Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton warned that Australia would face a US-style anti-AI backlash unless it kept Australians safe from the harms of AI.\n\nSo, why do Australians dislike and distrust this new technology so much?\n\nAfter all, it's hard to imagine crowds cheering or a pope pontificating about another form of computing like this. (Although I would personally love to hear the bishop of Rome share his thoughts on the most promising approach in quantum computing.)\n\nOn paper, AI sounds like it should be popular. Its proponents predict that it will make us all richer, more capable and freer from drudgery thanks to the automation of boring tasks.\n\nOne school of thought is that the AI backlash is the predictable and typical response to any technology promoted as being transformative and disruptive. This growing antipathy towards AI is an issue that one Australian industry group representing tech companies called for the government to run a public campaign to \"improve digital literacy and counter misinformation\".\n\nFears about the workforce\n\nWhile many Australians may not be as immersed in AI as its makers and promoters, there's a big factor other than what Australians aren't hearing about AI.\n\nIt's what they are hearing about it.\n\nLast month, the chief of global bank Standard Chartered said that AI would replace \"lower-value human capital\". That's human beings.\n\nMicrosoft's AI chief said most tasks performed by white-collar workers will be automated within the next 12-18 months.\n\nAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that 50 per cent of white-collar jobs would be eliminated in five years, pushing unemployment to 10-20 per cent.\n\nSome of this is AI leaders warning about the consequences of AI replacing human work, but it's also part of the marketing pitch, too.\n\nFor all the predictions made by AI companies and the government about economy-wide productivity boosts or about helping businesses cut costs, most working people rely on their jobs.\n\nWhat those people are hearing is that AI might make them more efficient, but it might also make their roles redundant. (Evidence of AI affecting Australian employment across the economy remains fairly weak, but it is early days.)\n\nAnother issue is the existential risks associated with the technology. Whether it's the fear that a rogue AI will go Skynet and destroy our systems or that it'll be used to create synthetic bioweapons, these potential downsides are another reason to dislike the technology.\n\nThere's also the immense amount of hype surrounding AI.\n\nBill Simpson-Young is a former CSIRO researcher who left to set up the Gradient Institute, an Australian not-for-profit dedicated to promoting the safe use of AI.\n\nHe reckons it's obvious why Australians don't trust AI: \"It's because they've got bullshit detectors.\"\n\nSimpson-Young says there's scepticism about the influence of American tech companies — some of which already have battered reputations because of their social media operations — and a fear about how the tech could further consolidate power in the hands of a few.\n\nThen, there's the actual lived experience of many Australians who are already being exposed to AI and its impacts.\n\nAustralians are regularly being exposed to AI slop and fake news. They're hearing about school children being abused with non-consensual sexual deepfakes. Their favourite artists are talking about how companies have ripped off their content without their knowledge, consent, or compensation. They see the headlines about tech companies paying little tax.\n\n'I don't trust it'\n\nCrucially, Australians' views are grounded in using the technology. We're among the highest users of AI in the world. Instead of this uptake allaying our fears, our use is feeding it. Surveys done over time show that the more Australians use AI, the more they say they believe the risks outweigh the benefits.\n\nAs ACTU secretary Sally McManus told business and technology leaders at the Australian Financial Review's AI Summit earlier this week: \"I don't trust it. On the other hand, I use it a lot.\"\n\nThis broad distrust added a rather gloomy note, coming up time and time again among Australian business and tech leaders who were otherwise enthusiastic about the technology.\n\nCharlton's cautionary message was delivered at the same event. It was notably distinct from the standard stump politician speech about how the federal government wants to rev up AI investment and usage.\n\nOther members of the government are pushing them to do more. Independent federal MP Kate Chaney released a discussion paper outlining 18 ideas for managing the benefits and risks of AI.\n\nOn the industry side, the group representing major data centre developers, Data Centres Australia, is now proactively engaging with local councils to try and make a positive case for how this infrastructure should be built in communities.\n\nThe growing tech backlash of the last decade has curdled into a febrile environment for AI makers who are trying to change Australian law, use Australian resources, and ask Australians to adopt their products.\n\nThe AI industry, business and government are now grappling with this issue, wondering why Australians don't trust AI and the people who make it.\n\nAnother way of looking at it is: what have they done to earn Australians' trust?","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-04/artificial-intelligence-australians-trust-survey-pope-leo-ai/106745098. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-26","numeric_id":26,"title":"What do the pope and most Australians have in common?","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/what-do-the-pope-and-most-australians","published_at":"2026-06-04T00:19:42+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Neither trust AI or the people behind it. And that's a big problem.","text":"Hello!\n\nI just published: What do the pope and most Australians have in common? Neither trust AI companies\n\nAs I get a feel for this beat, one thing has been coming up time and time again. I hear it from companies, politicians, academics, activists.\n\nAI is pretty unpopular.\n\nObviously, there’s plenty of negative news coverage of it. But, still, for something that is promising so much, that is used by millions of Australians, I was surprised by just how poorly it is viewed.\n\nWhat I wanted to lay out is how this isn’t simply a comms problem, but a barrier based in people’s real experiences for an industry (and a government) that is asking the Australians to use their products, share their resources and even change their laws.\n\nThanks, CW\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"What do the pope and most Australians have in common?\", webcam, 2026-06-04, https://webcam.substack.com/p/what-do-the-pope-and-most-australians","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [What do the pope and most Australians have in common?](https://webcam.substack.com/p/what-do-the-pope-and-most-australians) — webcam — 2026-06-04","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/what-do-the-pope-and-most-australians"},{"id":"camfeed-37","numeric_id":37,"title":"Changing the algorithm to fix our social media feeds - ABC listen","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/lifematters/social-media-algorithms-fix-our-feeds/106743740","published_at":"2026-05-31T23:00:00+00:00","source":"ABC listen","source_type":"manual","type":"appearance","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Australia's social media ban has been in place for six months — with mixed reports on its success. For teens managing to bypass the ban, they're still swimming in the same addictive stream of harmful content. But could we change the way these algorithms work, and make social media a better place for everyone?","text":"Australia's social media ban has been in place for six months — with mixed reports on its success. For teens managing to bypass the ban, they're still swimming in the same addictive stream of harmful content. But could we change the way these algorithms work, and make social media a better place for everyone?","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Changing the algorithm to fix our social media feeds - ABC listen\", ABC listen, 2026-06-01, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/lifematters/social-media-algorithms-fix-our-feeds/106743740","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Changing the algorithm to fix our social media feeds - ABC listen](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/lifematters/social-media-algorithms-fix-our-feeds/106743740) — ABC listen — 2026-06-01","attribution":"Source: ABC listen. Link to canonical URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/lifematters/social-media-algorithms-fix-our-feeds/106743740"},{"id":"camfeed-27","numeric_id":27,"title":"Meet the philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/meet-the-philosopher-tasked-with","published_at":"2026-05-30T02:23:25+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Dr Kate Conroy has been appointed the inaugural head of Australia's AI Safety Institute","text":"Hiya!\n\nI just published Kate Conroy appointed inaugural general manager of Australian AI Safety Institute\n\nI’m pretty interested in the government’s yet-to-be-launched AI Safety Institute.\n\nFor context, the federal government ditched plans for a dedicated AI Act, mandatory high risk guardrails for AI use or a independent regulator.\n\nNow, we’ve got a body that sits inside government, has no real powers, and a fairly modest budget that is supposed to contend with the enormous challenge of understanding cutting edge AI developments, testing, and advising how to avoid those risks.\n\nEven the decision about risks to focus on is fairly consequential: there’s current risks (everything from deepfakes to misinformation to intellectual property etc) to existential risk (SkyNet et al.). And then there’s the risk of potentially failing to seize promised benefits.\n\nDr Kate Conroy has a long career working with government on how to use AI ethically. She’s very qualified. The choice to go with her, rather than someone from industry or someone with a real technical expertise, sends a message about what the government wants from this role.\n\nThanks for reading and would love to hear if you have any thoughts.\n\nThanks, CW\n\nP.S. I love tips . I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message me on encrypted messaging app Signal or send me a secure email here .","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Meet the philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI\", webcam, 2026-05-30, https://webcam.substack.com/p/meet-the-philosopher-tasked-with","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Meet the philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI](https://webcam.substack.com/p/meet-the-philosopher-tasked-with) — webcam — 2026-05-30","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/meet-the-philosopher-tasked-with"},{"id":"camfeed-18","numeric_id":18,"title":"Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306","published_at":"2026-05-29T02:23:02+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"A philosopher and Royal Australian Air Force reservist has been chosen to lead the federal government's efforts to keep Australians safe from the harms of AI.","text":"A philosopher and Royal Australian Air Force reservist has been chosen to lead the federal government's efforts to keep Australians safe from the harms of AI.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1161,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:52+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI\", ABC News, 2026-05-29, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306) — ABC News — 2026-05-29","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-27","title":"Meet the philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/meet-the-philosopher-tasked-with","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/27.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-05-30T02:23:25+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","excerpt":"Hiya! I just published Kate Conroy appointed inaugural general manager of Australian AI Safety Institute I’m pretty interested in the government’s yet-to-be-launched AI Safety Institute. For context, the federal government ditched plans for a dedicated AI Act, mandatory high ris...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"A philosopher and Royal Australian Air Force reservist has been chosen to lead the federal government's efforts to keep Australians safe from the harms of artificial intelligence.\n\nTwo sources with knowledge of the appointment but not authorised to speak publicly told the ABC Kate Conroy started as the inaugural general manager of the Australian AI Safety Institute earlier this month.\n\nThe institute is a new government body that sits within the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. It is not a standalone, independent regulator.\n\nIts job is to monitor, test and share information on emerging AI capabilities, risks and harms.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department of Industry, Science and Resources confirmed the appointment.\n\n\"Dr Conroy has been appointed as general manager, AI governance. This team is working to establish the Australian AI Safety Institute,\" they said.\n\nDr Conroy takes up the role as Australia works through how to regulate AI, with the technology already integrated into workplaces, national security, education and public services.\n\nFrom philosophy to inside a Poseidon P-8A\n\nThe department spokesperson described Dr Conroy as a \"global expert in responsible AI\".\n\nDr Conroy comes to the role with a background of working with governments on AI ethics and risks, particularly around autonomous systems and robotics.\n\nShe remains the lead of responsible AI at the Royal Australian Air Force, where she has been involved in the introduction of its first AI system to run live inside a plane's systems, the Poseidon P-8A, as part of AUKUS Pillar II.\n\nIn a Department of Defence media release, Dr Conroy described the plane's AI system working as \"a helper, not a decider\".\n\nShe said it would present incoming data and give the crew feedback on the plane's operation but left the decision-making to the humans.\n\nIn 2022, Dr Conroy authored an academic paper warning militaries could \"cook\" personnel into \"bad apples\" if they delegated more parts of the decision-making process in war situations to AI.\n\nDr Conroy has also worked as the chief scientist for the Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence Cooperative Research Centre, where she co-authored technical reports and created toolkits for the ethical use of AI in armed forces.\n\nOutside of the military, Dr Conroy had primarily worked with the government and as an academic.\n\nImmediately before her role in the air force, Dr Conroy worked for the Queensland government, introducing rules to evaluate and manage the risks of AI in government.\n\nShe co-authored a framework for governments using AI that was adopted as the national standard in 2024.\n\nShe obtained a PhD in philosophy in 2013 and has held roles at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.\n\nAustralia's approach to AI safety\n\nDr Conroy's appointment puts an AI ethics specialist, rather than a conventional technical specialist or former regulator, at the head of Australia's first AI safety body.\n\nShe is the first confirmed member of the AI Safety Institute, which was announced in November 2025 as part of the rollout of the national AI plan.\n\nMinister for Industry, Innovation and Science Tim Ayres said at the time that Australia would only be able to seize the opportunities of AI if it was also able to manage its risks.\n\nThe AI Safety Institute would be used to assess these risks, Mr Ayres said.\n\n\"The institute will be the government's hub of AI safety expertise. It will operate with transparency, responsiveness and technical rigour to make sure Australians are confident to use this game-changing technology safely,\" he said.\n\nThe institute has been given funding of $29.9 million over four years and was set to be established in \"early 2026\".\n\nIts creation followed the government's decision to move away from a proposed single AI Act, a central AI regulator and advisory body of experts, and instead rely on existing regulators and agencies to manage AI harms across their own areas.\n\nUnder the national AI plan, the institute will have to work on both \"upstream\" risks and \"downstream\" harms.\n\nThe plan defines upstream risks as the capabilities of AI models and the way they are built and trained.\n\nDownstream harms are the real-world effects people experience when AI systems are used.\n\nThat gives the institute a wide remit: from advanced model testing and international AI safety research to the everyday consequences of AI systems being used in workplaces, government services, finance and consumer products.\n\nAustralians using AI but do not trust it\n\nThe institute's imminent opening comes at an important time for AI in Australia.\n\nSince the generative AI boom was sparked with the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, there has been a rapid growth in use of products and tools powered by the new technology.\n\nAt the same time, public polling consistently shows there is a broad distrust of the technology among Australians.\n\nA recent global survey of attitudes towards AI in 23 countries found Australians were already using AI widely but had the equal-worst sentiment towards the technology.\n\nThe study found 68 per cent of Australians were worried about losing control over decisions AI made on their behalf, while 81 per cent supported stronger rules for how organisations used AI.\n\nThere has also been public discussion over which safety risks should be the focus of the safety institute's modest resources and capacity.\n\nThe University of New South Wales AI Institute's chief scientist and leading AI researcher, Toby Walsh, said the new body would need to carefully decide what to focus on.\n\n\"The big challenge for the AI Safety Institute is being able to provide meaningful support and advice given the level of funding it's got,\" he said.\n\nSome experts want Australia to focus heavily on frontier models and their potential future risks: the most advanced systems developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind and what they might be capable of in the years to come.\n\nA significant amount of work by the long-running international AI safety community has been focused on so-called \"existential risks\" to humanity, including rogue AIs, bioweapons and other doomsday scenarios.\n\nOthers argue the institute should focus on the current harms, including discrimination, privacy breaches, scams, unsafe products and opaque decision-making in government and business.\n\nIts sister institute, the UK's AI Security Institute, has emerged as one of the world's leading safety organisations.\n\nIt was one of the first organisations, and the first non-US-based one, to publish a public evaluation of Anthropic's Claude Mythos, a new AI model which was held back from public release by its maker for being too \"dangerous\".\n\nAustralia has already moved to connect its institute to the UK's. Earlier this week, the governments signed a memorandum of understanding on safe and secure AI.\n\nThe agreement covers sharing information about emerging AI capabilities and risks, joint research on measuring and testing AI systems, and support for international AI measurement and evaluation work.\n\nThe Department of Industry spokesperson did not say when the Australian AI Safety Institute would formally open, only that it would be \"operational soon\".","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-36","numeric_id":36,"title":"Is the AI data centre boom threatening Australia's energy transition? - ABC listen","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-radio-national-hour/cam-wilson/106729042","published_at":"2026-05-27T06:45:00+00:00","source":"ABC listen","source_type":"manual","type":"appearance","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"A new report commissioned by Greenpeace is warning the growth of AI could outpace the rollout of renewable energy, potentially delaying the transition away from coal and gas.","text":"A new report commissioned by Greenpeace is warning the growth of AI could outpace the rollout of renewable energy, potentially delaying the transition away from coal and gas.","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Is the AI data centre boom threatening Australia's energy transition? - ABC listen\", ABC listen, 2026-05-27, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-radio-national-hour/cam-wilson/106729042","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Is the AI data centre boom threatening Australia's energy transition? - ABC listen](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-radio-national-hour/cam-wilson/106729042) — ABC listen — 2026-05-27","attribution":"Source: ABC listen. Link to canonical URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-radio-national-hour/cam-wilson/106729042"},{"id":"camfeed-19","numeric_id":19,"title":"'None of this was forecast': Energy demand from AI data centres soars","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390","published_at":"2026-05-27T00:00:00+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"A new report concludes the AI-fuelled surge of power-hungry data centres across Australia is jeopardising the country's energy transition.","text":"A new report concludes the AI-fuelled surge of power-hungry data centres across Australia is jeopardising the country's energy transition.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1308,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:52+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"'None of this was forecast': Energy demand from AI data centres soars\", ABC News, 2026-05-27, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, ['None of this was forecast': Energy demand from AI data centres soars](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390) — ABC News — 2026-05-27","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390","full_text":"Data centres powering the artificial intelligence boom could demand more new electricity over the coming 15 years than Australia's cars or homes, according to a Greenpeace report that warns the sudden and unprecedented growth threatens the country's transition to renewable energy.\n\nThe report used government projections, suggesting that data centres' demand for energy will increase more than sixfold from 2024–25 to 2040, surging from 2 to 13 per cent of the country's total energy use.\n\nIt comes as a major electricity network provider warns it already does not have enough capacity to power every data centre currently in the planning pipeline.\n\nAnalysis commissioned by Greenpeace Australia Pacific said the current and projected energy use from a new wave of large, power-hungry data centres added to the challenge of climate policies aimed at closing coal-fired power stations and building enough renewable energy to replace them.\n\nKnow more about Australia's AI data centre build-out? Email Cameron Wilson on wilson.cameron@abc.net.au or his secure email cmwlsn@protonmail.com.\n\nThe report said the increase was being driven in large part by artificial intelligence, which required large amounts of computing power to train and run systems such as chatbots, image generators and coding assistants.\n\nThe environmental group called for a moratorium on new data centres until governments legislated transparency measures and safeguards around the use of electricity, water and emissions.\n\nReport author Ketan Joshi said that Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) figures showed data centres could account for 13 per cent of total national electricity demand in 2040 under a high-growth scenario.\n\nThe report said AEMO's projected demand from data centres in 2040 increased more than fivefold between its 2024 report and its 2025 report.\n\nGreenpeace said that would put data centre demand at the same level or greater than the energy needed for electrification of cars, homes and potentially businesses.\n\nThe report said the projections of the scale of the data centre build-out were backed up by economic data showing an acceleration in data centre-related spending.\n\nIt cited Australian Bureau of Statistics data showing spending grew more than 60 per cent in the September 2025 quarter, reaching $2.6 billion — an increase of more than 140 per cent on the previous year.\n\nOne proposed data centre in western Sydney — the Mamre Road Data Centre Campus at Kemps Creek — would result in 1.3 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions in 2032, according to its environmental impact statement, the Greenpeace report said.\n\nMr Joshi said this was about the same as the greenhouse gas emissions of all domestic flights within NSW in 2023.\n\nGreenpeace said this presented a risk that the large energy demands of data centres would arrive faster than renewable energy, storage and transmission could be built.\n\n\"From a standing start, billions of dollars are now pouring into a massive pipeline of proposed new data centres, of unprecedented size, being built at incredible speed in our suburbs,\" Greenpeace's head of climate and energy Joe Rafalowicz said.\n\nWhen that happens, the report said, coal and gas generators may need to run for longer or harder to fill the gap.\n\nGreenpeace said Australia should require new data centres to source power from new renewable projects, disclose their energy use and emissions, and be subject to stronger approval rules.\n\n'Two years ago, none of this was forecast'\n\nUniversity of New South Wales senior research associate Dylan McConnell said the analysis captured the scale and speed of demand from new data centres.\n\nEnergy providers typically work on longer timeframes, with power agreements and new project construction typically spanning several years.\n\nPrior to the data centre boom of the last few years, increases in energy demand were \"modest\", Dr McConnell said.\n\n\"If you go back even two years, none of this was forecast,\" he said.\n\nThe generative AI boom sparked by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 has led to enormous growth in demand for computing power by global tech companies with products used by billions of users.\n\nThe resulting rush of local companies hoping to build data centres to serve this enormous demand completely up-ended the previous projections, Dr McConnell said.\n\n\"What we're seeing in the last 12 months, and official projections, they're big numbers. The projected new load by 2030 is another 10 terawatt hours, which is equivalent to all of Tasmania's demand,\" he said.\n\nCEO of industry group Data Centres Australia Belinda Dennett said her organisation's projections were aligned with AEMO's until 2030. After that, she said it became harder to predict.\n\n\"The further out you get, the less certain the projection becomes. Government policy will become a factor as to whether Australia captures the opportunity available to it,\" she said.\n\nDr McConnell said even the comparison between the demand of data centres with the electrification of vehicles, homes and businesses did not capture the impact of the new load.\n\nElectrification of vehicles and gas in houses is replacing an emission-intensive energy source with a lower-emission one.\n\n\"They're not replacing consumption of fossil energy, they're a new load,\" Dr McConnell said.\n\nHe said this mismatch of growing energy demand with the slower pace of building new renewable projects meant existing power plants may remain online for longer.\n\n\"As a consequence, that means we are going to be burning fossil fuels for longer than we would otherwise be,\" he said.\n\nEnergy provider warnings as developers line up\n\nThe warning comes as state and national energy bodies consider how the electricity system should deal with large data centres clustered around Sydney and Melbourne.\n\nNSW state energy grid provider Transgrid told a NSW parliamentary inquiry last week that the scale, pace and concentration of data centre development represented a \"material step-change\".\n\nIn March this year, the NSW government announced it was fast-tracking 15 data centre projects.\n\nTransgrid executive general manager Jason Krstanoski told the inquiry that existing regulatory arrangements \"were not designed for this level of large, clustered load growth\" with a glut of proposed data centres planning to be built in western Sydney, the Australian Financial Review reported.\n\nMr Krstanoski said it did not have any data centres connected directly to its transmission network, but had received inquiries representing more than 10 gigawatts of potential load.\n\nAbout 6 gigawatts of that had progressed to formal applications, although no operator had fully committed.\n\nMr Krstanoski said the new large loads should be required to pay for the infrastructure needed to supply them, including network upgrades triggered by a data centre, rather than spreading those costs across existing customers.\n\nEarlier this year, the federal government's Department of Industry, Science and Resources published a set of expectations for data centre developers.\n\nThese said the government would prioritise development applications that met certain expectations, including by bringing enough renewable energy generation and storage to offset their demand.\n\nA spokesperson for Assistant Minister for Science, Technology, and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said the government would not support projects that were not in line with these guidelines.\n\n\"The Australian government will continue to work with states and territories on the implementation of the expectations,\" they said.\n\nEarlier this month, state energy and federal energy ministers were presented with a set of proposals by the independent agency that advises government on the electricity market, the Australian Energy Market Commission.\n\nOne proposal would codify the government's expectation and require data centre providers to \"fully offset\" all their power consumption with new renewable energy.\n\nAll the ministers except Queensland's David Janetzki agreed with data centres being required to \"fully offset their demand\", according to an official statement put out after the meeting.\n\nOther proposals put to the ministers included requiring data centres to reduce their power use during peak demand and to report their energy use and emissions.\n\nThe AEMC will have to report back with options for how to implement these ideas in July.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/ai-data-centres-pressuring-energy-transition-greenpeace-says/106722390. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-28","numeric_id":28,"title":"New AI models 'too dangerous' to release are fuelling the government's desire to woo tech companies down under","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/new-ai-models-too-dangerous-to-release","published_at":"2026-05-20T11:34:01+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Anthropic's chief lawyer is in town this week. On the agenda for closed door meetings with senior government officials? Securing Australian access to its latest model, Mythos.","text":"G’day!\n\nI hope you don’t mind but I’m going to start using this list more regularly to send out my reporting (which, now in my new gig as the national AI reporter at the ABC, is no longer behind a paywall).\n\nJust in case, here’s an unsubscribe button if you’re not keen!\n\nunsubscribe\n\nSo: plenty in my first reported article about how access to cutting edge AI models are new leverage for tech companies considering whether to set up major operations in Australia or other countries.\n\nThe federal government is keen to get a company like Anthropic to make “major investments” here, according to a departmental briefing that I got via FOI, and has been willing to open up discussions about the AI’s company’s copyright problem.\n\nOK, enjoy!\n\nCW","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"New AI models 'too dangerous' to release are fuelling the government's desire to woo tech companies down under\", webcam, 2026-05-20, https://webcam.substack.com/p/new-ai-models-too-dangerous-to-release","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [New AI models 'too dangerous' to release are fuelling the government's desire to woo tech companies down under](https://webcam.substack.com/p/new-ai-models-too-dangerous-to-release) — webcam — 2026-05-20","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/new-ai-models-too-dangerous-to-release"},{"id":"camfeed-20","numeric_id":20,"title":"Banks, telcos briefed on threat of 'dangerous' AI model","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532","published_at":"2026-05-20T07:14:21+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"A new generation of AI models deemed \"too dangerous\" for public release is driving Australia's efforts to lure top AI companies to establish a major presence in the country.","text":"A new generation of AI models deemed \"too dangerous\" for public release is driving Australia's efforts to lure top AI companies to establish a major presence in the country.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1196,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T10:44:53+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Banks, telcos briefed on threat of 'dangerous' AI model\", ABC News, 2026-05-20, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Banks, telcos briefed on threat of 'dangerous' AI model](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532) — ABC News — 2026-05-20","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-28","title":"New AI models 'too dangerous' to release are fuelling the government's desire to woo tech companies down under","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/new-ai-models-too-dangerous-to-release","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/28.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-05-20T11:34:01+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Banks, telcos briefed on threat of 'dangerous' AI model","excerpt":"G’day! I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to start using this list more regularly to send out my reporting (which, now in my new gig as the national AI reporter at the ABC, is no longer behind a paywall). Just in case, here’s an unsubscribe button if you’re not keen! unsubscrib...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"A new generation of AI models deemed \"too dangerous\" for public release is driving Australia's efforts to lure top AI companies to establish a major presence in the country.\n\nThe chief lawyer of AI company Anthropic, Jeffrey Bleich, flew into Australia this week for meetings with senior government officials.\n\nOn the agenda for the meetings is obtaining access to Anthropic's newest model, Claude Mythos.\n\nMythos and a similar new model from rival OpenAI are being touted as so capable at finding cybersecurity weaknesses that the companies fear major disruptions if the technology falls into the wrong hands.\n\nNow, Australian agencies and companies are pushing for access to the models, adding to the buzzy AI company's leverage as it considers where it will set up major hubs outside the US.\n\nA federal government briefing, obtained under freedom of information laws, shows Australia wants \"major investments in Australia\" and is willing to discuss reviewing copyright laws as part of a deal.\n\nAnthropic briefs government, critical infrastructure on new AI cyber risks\n\nMr Bleich, who served as Barack Obama's ambassador to Australia from 2009 to 2013 and is now Anthropic's general counsel, met with Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, Andrew Charlton, staff from the Department of Home Affairs and the Australian Signals Directorate.\n\nA major change since the company's US executives visited in April is the limited release of Mythos.\n\nWhile AI makers often hype the capabilities of their products, organisations such as UK's AI Safety Institute and Mozilla, maker of web browser Firefox, have tested and vouch for the advanced capabilities of Mythos when it comes to finding bugs that could be exploited for cyber attacks.\n\nPreviously, Anthropic had released its models to any paying subscriber. But this time, the company chose to limit access to Mythos to about 50 mostly US-based technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google.\n\nNo Australian companies or organisations were on the list.\n\nOpenAI has followed suit and is only releasing its newest cybersecurity-based model, GPT-5.5-Cyber, to select customers.\n\nThe federal government declined to confirm or deny that its agencies and Australian companies still do not have access to Mythos.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs said it had \"extensive discussions with Anthropic on the cyber security implications of AI and improved cyber defence mechanisms\".\n\nHome Affairs has co-ordinated multiple meetings between Anthropic and Australian operators of critical infrastructure since the release of Mythos.\n\nLate last month Anthropic held a briefing with 170 representatives from Australian finance, communications, transport, energy, data, food and grocery sectors.\n\nThese organisations are declared as Systems of National Significance, a subset of critical infrastructure providers considered crucial to national security.\n\nA source with knowledge of the closed-door meetings between the government and Anthropic but not authorised to speak publicly said that Australian access to Mythos was a topic of discussion.\n\nA spokesperson for OpenAI told the ABC it was starting to roll out its Mythos-like model, GPT-5.5-Cyber, to a limited number of Australian organisations.\n\n\"We have begun rollout of our Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, including GPT-5.5-Cyber, to a handful of customers in Australia,\" they said. This includes Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, the Australian Financial Review reported.\n\nA spokesperson for Home Affairs minister Tony Burke said that the government was working with the private sector to prepare for developments in AI.\n\n\"Our government has put in place systems to help our country adapt to and resist evolving cyber threats,\" they said.\n\nAnthropic's spokesperson declined to comment on discussions in its meetings with government.\n\nAustralia's attempts to lure AI companies\n\nIn December the federal government released a national AI plan that included attracting big tech companies to invest here and mitigating risks from the technology.\n\nAI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as more established players such as Google, Meta and Amazon, see Australia as an attractive destination for building AI infrastructure in the southern hemisphere. Australia's skilled workforce, energy grid and political stability are all drawcards.\n\nIn the United States, Anthropic faces immense pressure from the Trump administration over its decision to limit the use of its models by the US military. The company is reportedly considering major expansion overseas.\n\nThe federal government wants Anthropic to pick Australia. It stepped up its courtship with a meeting on the sidelines of an international AI summit in India between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Charlton in February this year.\n\nDepartment of Industry briefing notes obtained through a freedom of information request reveal the government's thinking ahead of the meeting.\n\nUnder the heading \"What we want\", the document has three asks:\n\nThat Anthropic make \"major investments in ways that create benefits for Australia, including being additive to the energy grid\"\n\nThat it match commitments it made in the United States to cover grid infrastructure costs, build new power generation, reduce strain on the grid and invest in local communities\n\nThat it commit to working with Australia on frontier AI safety and security\n\nIt also seeks more information on Anthropic's major hurdles: \"[We want to] understand Anthropic's issues with Australia's copyright regime, how it affects their business and what alternatives have been explored.\"\n\nA spokesperson for the department of industry declined to comment on the briefing document.\n\nGroups representing tech companies and the private sector are arguing that Australia's copyright law limits AI investment in Australia.\n\nSo far, the Albanese government has ruled out giving AI companies an \"text and data mining\" exemption to train AI on Australian copyright material without payment.\n\nCreatives fear the government will agree to water down protections to clear way for investment for AI companies.\n\nSince the meeting in India the federal government and Anthropic have sought to formalise this increasingly close relationship.\n\nSix weeks later, Industry Minister Tim Ayres met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in Australia and signed a memorandum of understanding outlining a \"shared vision\" with the company.\n\nThe memo contains several of the asks from the briefing in non-binding forms.\n\nThe company also opened its Sydney office last month, its fourth office in the Asia-Pacific.\n\n'Winners are being picked'\n\nCyberCX chief strategy officer and former Australian national cybersecurity advisor Alastair MacGibbon said that securing access to cutting edge AI tools for Australian firms and agencies isn't the be-all-and-end-all.\n\nA lot of Australia's digital infrastructure is built on systems created by major technology firms and big international financial institutions that have been given early access to Anthropic's new model, he said.\n\nOn the other hand, many organisations have their own bespoke software that will not be supported by companies that have had access to these AI models, Mr MacGibbon said.\n\n\"Winners are being picked, and [the tech companies] chose in a US-centric way who the winners were,\" he said.\n\nMr MacGibbon said the responsibility for closing that gap should fall on governments, not on individual companies trying to negotiate access on their own.\n\nAn Anthropic spokesperson declined to say when Australian organisations outside the existing partners will get access to Mythos.\n\n\"We've been having constructive conversations with government, financial institutions, and enterprise customers globally; and plan to expand access safely in coordination with them in due course,\" the spokesperson said.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-20/anthropic-jeffery-bleich-in-australia-for-government-talks/106696532. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."},{"id":"camfeed-38","numeric_id":38,"title":"What is Palantir doing in Australia? - ABC listen","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-is-palantir-doing-in-australia-/106693684","published_at":"2026-05-18T15:00:00+00:00","source":"ABC listen","source_type":"manual","type":"appearance","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Palantir has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts with Australian federal and state governments. The ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson joins Matt to share the details. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq","text":"Palantir has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts with Australian federal and state governments. The ABC's national AI reporter Cam Wilson joins Matt to share the details. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"What is Palantir doing in Australia? - ABC listen\", ABC listen, 2026-05-19, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-is-palantir-doing-in-australia-/106693684","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [What is Palantir doing in Australia? - ABC listen](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-is-palantir-doing-in-australia-/106693684) — ABC listen — 2026-05-19","attribution":"Source: ABC listen. Link to canonical URL: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/if-youre-listening/what-is-palantir-doing-in-australia-/106693684"},{"id":"camfeed-29","numeric_id":29,"title":"After five long years...","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/after-five-long-years","published_at":"2026-05-11T11:18:27+00:00","source":"webcam","source_type":"substack","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"some personal news","text":"Hello!\n\nI’m emailing to say that, after five unforgettable years at Crikey and 18 months at the Sizzle, I’ve taken on a new role as the ABC’s national AI tech reporter.\n\nIt's a completely new position and, as far I know, the only reporting role of its kind in Australia.\n\nAnd what a beat it is! AI is one of the biggest stories in the world right now. There's an eye-watering amount of money, influence and hype involved which makes it ripe for critical, nuanced and innovative reporting.\n\nSo: if you have a story involving how Australians and AI, I'm all ears: wilson.cameron@abc.net.au . Or, you can contact me on secure email cmwlsn@protonmail.com or Signal @cmw.69 — confidentiality guaranteed!\n\nCheers,\n\nCam","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"After five long years...\", webcam, 2026-05-11, https://webcam.substack.com/p/after-five-long-years","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [After five long years...](https://webcam.substack.com/p/after-five-long-years) — webcam — 2026-05-11","attribution":"Source: webcam. Link to canonical URL: https://webcam.substack.com/p/after-five-long-years"}]}