AI is going to change everything. Australia should help steer that change
If there’s one thing we hope attendees take away from ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue AI Masterclass, it’s to reflect on whether we’re prepared for artificial intelligence that is smarter than us.
That, after all, is what people at the frontier anticipate within the next few years. If they’re right – and bear in mind, we believe in them enough to capitalise their companies at a trillion dollars or more – then humanity is about to cross a threshold like none we’ve crossed before.
Yet the policy responses and debates around the world are strangely mild. Granted, AI policymaking is hard – everyone knows this is a huge moment, but nobody knows quite where it is leading. Predicting the future to find the answers is an unenviable task, which is all the more reason for vigorous discussion to consider all the angles. This is precisely the reason why ASPI is hosting today’s AI Masterclass.
AI models are solving longstanding mathematical problems and predicting protein structures. At the same time, they are demonstrating frightening cyber prowess and driving agents that bizarrely coordinate amongst themselves to achieve their goals while staying hidden from their human operators.
The policy considerations are mammoth. Australia is looking for ways to secure a place for itself in the global AI industry and to climb the economic value ladder while avoiding the data centre backlash brewing in the United States. We’re looking for new ways to cooperate with fellow democracies as the world comes to terms with the profound effect AI will have on the shifting global pecking order.
Frontier AI capability is acutely concentrated in two countries, the US and China, who are also the century’s principal geopolitical rivals. AI’s growing role in warfare is playing out on battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East. The case for greater international coordination and governance is getting stronger every day, and calls from within the industry itself to voluntarily slow research and give safeguards time to catch up are getting harder to ignore.
The heads of the for-profit frontier companies are calling on each other to negotiate slowdowns and on democratic governments to regulate, putting themselves in a clearly unusual position in the history of for-profit company leaders. It certainly contrasts with the alarm raised by the social-media pioneers of the previous two decades who demanded governments stay out of their business lest it stifle innovation or infringe on free speech.
Take OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, who said in an essay on 6 September that even with defensive systems, active monitoring and matching scaling to safety, ‘I believe broader interventions are required’. Or take the company’s competitor, Anthropic, whose founder and chief executive, Dario Amodei, said in a June 2026 essay, ‘We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with the risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.’
And ‘surprisingly quickly’ is proving to be an understatement. Since Amodei’s essay, we have seen OpenAI’s autonomous agents break out of a cage that had no internet connection and break into an AI company, Hugging Face, to cheat on a test and cover their tracks; an Anthropic report revealing its own agents’ breakouts; and a separate analysis showing that Anthropic had blocked several attempts to use its most advanced public models to carry out research that could have helped develop biological weapons. Those are just a few of the astounding developments in recent weeks.
Yet the momentum in AI and the related urgency in policy development may be just beginning. Everything changes if we achieve superintelligence. And while even the world’s most accomplished experts across economics, national security, politics, social affairs and technology haven’t settled on the precise direction of change, we know it will be huge.
We cannot wait to take action only after we have got that certainty, because that will be too late. Australia and our region need a greater voice in the global conversation that shapes and prepares for that change. And we can play a part in that.
This article is an edited version of the program welcome for ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue AI Masterclass on Monday, 14 September in Canberra.
About Author
