Call for big tech to pay for Australian-made AI - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Calls for a levy on big tech to develop Australia's AI sovereignty come after OpenAI hacked Medicare. (Reuters: Kim Kyung-Hoon)

Big tech companies wanting to build data centres in Australia would pay a levy to fund the local AI industry under a plan from researchers and unions.

The proposal would not seek to build an Australian AI model from scratch but could include a homegrown chatbot like Claude.

The Australian AI industry is already struggling to access the level of computing resources needed for frontier development.

Tech giants who want to build data centres in Australia would be slugged with a levy to help fund a local artificial intelligence (AI) industry under a plan being pushed by researchers and union figures.

In a joint statement, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and leading AI academics argue the government must force investment in domestic AI capability and infrastructure, rather than depending on foreign companies to provide access to the technology.

The ABC can reveal companies such as US monoliths Anthropic and OpenAI would be required to hand over a portion of their data centre computing capacity in return for developing AI on Australian soil under the proposal.

The siphoned "compute", or processing power, would be pooled and distributed by the federal government, while an "AI capability contribution" may also be paid by those same companies to fund the people, software and infrastructure needed to use it.

Leading AI researcher Sue Keay from UNSW said Australia did not have a shortage of talent but lacked the "confidence, investment and coordination" to back its own ability.

"If AI is going to shape our health care, public services, workplaces and economy, Australians need genuine influence over how those systems are developed, governed and deployed."

The proposal, signed by the UNSW AI Institute, the Australian Institute for Machine Learning at Adelaide University and the Kingston AI Group as well as the ACTU, describes the need to "cultivate our own AI industry" instead of playing a supporting role to US-based multinationals.

"Australia has the talent, sector expertise and demand to build substantial AI capability. What it lacks is a funded national ambition and coordinated access to computing resoruces, skills, research support and patient capital," it reads.

Governments in several countries, including the UK, Norway, the US and Korea, have already committed billions to develop publicly owned AI computing resources and infrastructure.

Under the proposal, framed as the "next logical step", Australia-specific AI would be developed to make work more productive and keep jobs in the country "that would otherwise move overseas".

It outlines how investment in a homegrown industry could both safeguard Australian access to the technology and ensure local communities get a return for hosting big tech.

The plan would not seek to build a frontier AI model, like the most powerful releases from Anthropic or OpenAI, but could include narrower models used for specific use cases or customised to work with existing Australian organisations and systems.

"We don't need to build the biggest AI models out there," ACTU assistant secretary Joseph Mitchell said.

"[Let's develop] smaller models built for Australian conditions, adapting open-weight models, and keeping critical services operating if access to US-based frontier models are disrupted again."

Mr Mitchell said requiring multinationals making money in Australia to push the local AI industry forward would set up permanent accountability.

The ACTU also floated the potential involvement of the superannuation industry as an investment solution, urging the government to include the sector in a coordinated effort to bring a sovereign AI industry online.

The concept of a tax or levy on AI is gaining ground, with tech magnate Bill Gates saying during an interview on the Ezra Klein podcast this week he believed the next policy step would be "robot tax".

"If you've let go of a worker and hired a robot to do that job, why are you so incentivising the trade-off against the human labour that you don't ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund?" Mr Gates said.

The government is already working on how Australia can extract value from the AI industry, given the interest from big tech companies who want to set up shop in the country.

Later this year, the prime minister hopes to introduce laws that would require developers to build renewable power infrastructure to meet the demands of their tech projects and minimise water use.

Andrew Charlton, Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, has signalled he also wants to broker computing power from the AI companies as an additional requirement to build in Australia.

Andrew Charlton has spoken about the need to get something back from the tech companies. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

He told the Joe Walker podcast in August the government must make sure "big compute build-out delivers benefits to Australians" but admitted there were unanswered questions about the government's ability to "extract rent".

Already, Australia is struggling to meet existing local demand for AI infrastructure, with much of the GPU capacity — the heavy-hitting technology needed for AI frontier development — being found offshore.

Last month, startup accelerator Stone & Chalk chief executive Stela Solar, who runs the Buy Australian AI initiative, said securing domestic computing power was critical for growth of the sector.

"If we don't secure compute capability for homegrown technologies, we actually risk being squeezed out of the very sovereign AI foundations that we're building here," she said.

"That means while we might experience productivity gains from AI, we won't gain from the wealth growth that AI is bringing because that will land in other countries."