As it heads towards a US$2 trillion IPO, AI titan Anthropic told Parliament it has accepted a broad copyright exemption is not on the table – but calls for a more narrow concession.
AI giant Anthropic told a Parliamentary Committee that it will invest in large data centre projects in Australia, but called for the government to establish a mechanism that would allow it to train models on copyrighted material.
Anthropic, which last week signed a deal to be a cornerstone tenant of a $32 billion data centre in Queensland, conceded that a broad copyright exemption that would allow it carte blanche to use copyrighted material for frontier model development is off the table.
“Anthropic accepts that broad exceptions from copyright, such as a text and data mining exception, have not received widespread support and have been ruled out by the Government,” a Tuesday submission to a parliamentary enquiry into Australian AI adoption read.
“As an alternative, we believe that the Government could permit AI model training through a narrow form of conditional approval.”
Anthropic suggests the Government set conditions under which eligible AI developers could use copyrighted material for training. It says publishers and creators could retain the option to opt-out of having content scraped for model training, and acknowledged the possibility that companies like itself may be pushed to pay for the right.
“We understand that the Government may choose to require investment or other conditions designed to support the future of Australian creators and cultural endeavours, and we are open to considering those conditions,” Anthropic’s submission reads.
Copyright has been a polarising topic in Australian policy and tech circles for the last 13 months. Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar last August fronted the National Press Club in his capacity as chair of the Tech Council of Australia and argued that Australia should weaken its copyright protections in line with the US to attract Big Tech investment.
“We remain an outlier when it comes to copyright,” Farquhar said, igniting a policy debate that has raged since. “Fixing this one thing could unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment in Australia.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seemingly shut down the debate in July, however, when he said unequivocally that “writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work.”
Anthropic is eager to buy 1.4 GW of capacity in Australia, according to a tender document seen in July by the Australian Financial Review, which would carry a potential investment of over $20 billion.
Anthropic said it would meet expectations and legislation that requires data centre builders to supply more energy to the grid than their infrastructure demands and to minimise water use.
“Anthropic’s preference is to build this compute infrastructure in regional, rural and remote Australia,” the submission reads. “Infrastructure… will create thousands of construction and ongoing jobs in the regional communities that they operate in.”
Anthropic last raised money in May at a US$965 million valuation, but it is reportedly plotting a November IPO that would see it debut at a market cap of US$2 trillion. It would be the biggest IPO of all time.
The company has been in the spotlight not for its finances, however, but the possibility that it might end human life as we know it. Responding to an employee who resigned from the AI lab, Anthropic’s head of alignment Evan Hubinger wrote on X that he believes there is a greater than 10 per cent chance “AI could kill all humans in the next decade.
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