Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, in an attempt to set up guardrails governing how the rapidly growing industry will operate in the country.
The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe.
Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months.
The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies.
“Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework,” Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue.
The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan.
The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an “Office of A.I.” directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation.
The “Australian Standards for A.I.” will include a “legal obligation” for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said.
Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems.
“Anything less is theft,” he said. “No country has got this right yet.”
Industry representatives responded cautiously, expressing support for standards while warning against overregulation.
“We can’t go too far. We can’t be too prescriptive, because we are in a race and we are in a competitive contest in that regard,” Bran Black, chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, told reporters. He said he did not agree with imposing mandatory obligations and warned that being out of step with other jurisdictions could mean Australia loses out on the immense investment being poured into the industry.
In the United States, backlash against data centers has prompted dozens of proposed moratoriums at the state and federal level, with New York this week becoming the first state to halt the construction of the largest data centers for a year. The European Union has rolled out an “A.I. Act” mandating transparency, copyright and public safety measures in the industry, under which regulators are set to begin imposing penalties beginning in August.
Here is how tech companies responded to Australia’s announcement:
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Microsoft said in a statement that it supported Mr. Albanese’s vision and that the company believed A.I. “should be built and applied in ways that reflect a country’s values and serve its national interest.”
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OpenAI said in a statement that Australia was a priority market and that it was “engaging constructively” with the government, creators and industry.
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Anthropic said in a statement that it respected the process laid out by the prime minister for establishing Australia’s A.I. framework, and that it took its responsibility to meet the terms seriously.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems, which the companies have denied.)
Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said Mr. Albanese was saying all the right things to assuage public concerns about the industry, but that many of the specifics of the regulations still needed to be worked out.
“The prime minister was clearly on top of the issues that are troubling the Australian public, and troubling the publics around the world,” he said. “The devil will be in the details exactly what they do.”
For Australia to capitalize fully on A.I., it will need to go beyond attracting data center investments to building its own homegrown companies, models and work force, Mr. Walsh said.
Mr. Albanese likened the efforts to set standards for the industry to his government’s world-first social media law banning the use of the services for children younger than 16, saying it was important to get ahead of the technological shifts profoundly altering societies and economies.
“Imagine if the world had acted a decade ago. Imagine the difference it would have made if these limits had been put in place when the world first grasped the risks of these platforms,” he said of the social media law.
He added: “That is the opportunity, and the choice, we have now with artificial intelligence.”
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