The debate over whether Australia should allow AI to train on scraped creative works has become entangled with a much larger prize: tens of billions of dollars in data centre investment and a strategic foothold in the emerging AI economy.
US company Anthropic is reportedly looking to make Australia its “second home” for training AI models, with the associated infrastructure worth around US$15 billion (A$21 billion). But a Treasury briefing released in July showed Anthropic’s proposed expenditure was contingent on the “clarity” of Australia’s copyright law.