In parliamentary submissions, OpenAI and Anthropic asked Canberra for a narrow conditional path to train on Australian creative works after the government ruled out a broad copyright exemption, tying the ask to planned data-center investment.
OpenAI and Anthropic urged Australia to rethink a ban on using the country’s creative content to train AI models, arguing a limited exemption could protect artists while still attracting investment, Reuters reported from Sydney on Tuesday.
Australia has said it will implement a broad set of AI and data-center rules from next year, but has already ruled out a copyright exemption that would let mostly US-based companies train there. In September submissions to a parliamentary inquiry on AI laws, both companies acknowledged that ban and called for it to be relaxed.
Anthropic said it accepts that broad copyright exceptions have not received widespread support and have been ruled out by the government. As an alternative, the Claude owner said Canberra could permit model training through a “narrow form of conditional approval,” and that it is open to investment or other conditions designed to support Australian creators and cultural work.
OpenAI called for “a balanced copyright framework that allows models to learn from publicly available information” while giving rightsholders chances to collaborate. Both companies tied the issue to infrastructure already in motion: OpenAI has an offtake agreement with Australian data-center developer NextDC for a planned Sydney site, and Anthropic was named last week as a partner for a Queensland data center, Reuters said.
Creators, authors, and publishers have resisted exemptions that would let commercial models train on their work without consent or payment. The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence is due to deliver its report in November.
This brief covers the Tuesday Reuters account of the submissions. It is not a rewrite of earlier Australia data-center partnership coverage.