Australia may make knowingly selling unsafe AI a crime
Australia’s government will consider creating a new criminal offense to punish AI companies which knowingly release harmful models.
Key points
- Such investments would mean Australia scores some of the AI boom cash sloshing around the world, while also giving the government the ability to at least point to leading-edge AI running on local shores and therefore theoretically remaining accessible even if war or a diplomatic rupture makes it hard to access advanced AI hosted offshore.
- Threatening to lock up AI executives is not likely to make them enthusiastic when asked to approve building datacenters down under.
- Canberra dangled that possibility yesterday when releasing the results of an investigation into OpenAI’s admission that its agents accessed non-public medical records – and that it didn’t disclose the incident for weeks.
Security at the agency which held those records fell short of contemporary best practice but Canberra nonetheless ordered a rapid review into Australia’s ability to handle infosec incidents involving AI.
Some sections of Australia’s population won’t mind it if big tech doesn’t show up: Protests against datacenters are already widespread.
Additional details
- Other nations in Asia, such as South Korea and India, are addressing those risks by building substantial sovereign infrastructure and working to develop sovereign frontier-class models trained on local data and especially data in their local languages.
- Your correspondent recently spoke to the organizer of a protest group opposed to development of a new datacenter which is just three kilometers from four existing bit barns, one of which abuts a sizable apartment complex and has operated without incident or opposition for years.
- The other reason Australia might not criminalize AI is economic pragmatism.
- Canberra wants to ensure leading AI companies invest in local datacenters, especially facilities where they train and run frontier models.
- The organizer was blissfully ignorant of those facilities and eventually said their group is opposed to AI in all forms.
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