{"id":"camfeed-18","numeric_id":18,"short_title":"Meet Australia's first AI safety chief","seo_title":"Kate Conroy appointed inaugural general manager of Australian AI Safety Institute - ABC News","social_title":"Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","headline":"Kate Conroy appointed inaugural general manager of Australian AI Safety Institute","teaser_title":"Philosopher tasked with keeping Australians safe from AI","titles_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/kate-conroy-leading-ai-safety-institute/106736306","titles_fetched_at":"2026-09-05T04:20:21+00:00","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":"2026-05-29T00:42:17+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."}