The AI titan told a Joint Parliamentary Committee that it could be open to paying a fee to a fund for Australian creatives as compensation for using local content to train models.
OpenAI says it is open to the idea of paying into a fund that rewards creatives for work used to train its artificial intelligence models, potentially clearing a path to billions in Australian data centre investments.
The signal came in documents supplied to a parliamentary inquiry into AI adoption in Australia on Tuesday, with OpenAI responding to Labor MP Tim Watts’ query on whether it would accept a policy requiring it to pay fees into a fund for Australian creators.
“Potentially,” the tech giant wrote. “This would depend on the activities and data that are in scope, the opt-out requirement, total fees and whether the scheme provides legal certainty. All of these factors, in sum, would have to be competitive with other jurisdictions, particularly the US.”
Though laden with qualifications, OpenAI being open to such an arrangement could present a path forward from the impasse copyright has created.
Anthropic and OpenAI have both flagged interest in spending billions on data centres in Australia, reasoning that the country is rich in the land and renewable energy potential required to enable AI infrastructure. But while AI companies use a fair use exemption to train models on copyrighted material in the US, Australian law generally requires a licence or compensation agreement.
OpenAI senior vice president of global policy Ann O’Leary last month told The Australian that Australia could be the first country outside of the US and China to host AI model training. Whether or not it does, she said, “is really a copyright question more than a renewable energy question.”
“Our company isn’t ready to have that conversation if we can’t get through the gating problem of the copyright barriers.”
A plan to pay creatives via contributions to a fund would be different to bespoke agreements OpenAI and its peers have made with individual media outlets like Politico publisher Axel Springer and the Financial Times.
These agreements, OpenAI told the committee, are “primarily aimed at displaying substantial excerpts of journalism with attribution and links” rather than paying for content used to train models.
OpenAI in its response document to the joint committee said its Australian operation booked $3.86 million in revenue between 14 May and 31 December 2025. It is likely that its bigger deals were registered with its US parent company – OpenAI counts Commonwealth Bank, Coles and Virgin among its Australian enterprise customers.
OpenAI last December signed a memorandum of understanding with Australian data centre operator NextDC. The MOU means OpenAI has expressed interest in becoming a key customer at a planned $7 billion Sydney campus, but it is non binding.
The company previously struck an agreement to build an enormous data centre campus in north-east England, but earlier this year pulled out of the deal citing UK regulation and the cost of energy.
Meanwhile Anthropic has acknowledged that an agreement to pay into a fund for creatives is a possibility but has not supported such a policy. Its general counsel, Jeff Bleich, told the joint parliamentary committee earlier this month that Australia should “forge its own system to provide legal certainty under copyright.”
“There is an opportunity to create a uniquely Australian framework that can deliver legal certainty for training-scale investment while generating direct support for Australian creators,” Bleich said.
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