Australia Promised Artists Control Over AI Training. A Leaked Plan Would Make Them Opt Out.

Kylie Minogue never licensed her lyrics to a chatbot, yet the music publishers' global trade body says one can recite them anyway. That claim now sits at the center of the Australia AI copyright fight, where the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) accuses AI companies of trying to "strong-arm" the government into loosening its rules, according to Music Business Worldwide, citing Guardian Australia.

"They're trying to strong-arm Australian policymakers into 'if you don't do this, we won't invest,'" ICMP Director General John Phelan told the Guardian. In his telling, AI firms want lawmakers to "legitimize larceny."

He named names, too. Phelan told the Australian Financial Review that Australia was one of a series of countries to come into the "crosshairs" of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, as reported by Music Business Worldwide.

What Evidence Says Australian Songs Already Trained AI?

There are two pieces, and they deserve to be pulled apart. ICMP gave the Guardian evidence that Google's Gemini could produce the lyrics to songs by Minogue, G Flip and Nick Cave, which cuts against AI companies' argument that Australia's rules kept local content out of their training, per MBW. Google was approached for comment.

Phelan also pointed to LAION-DISCO-12M, a dataset of links to more than 12 million YouTube songs that The Atlantic exposed in June, including tracks by Minogue, Cave and Hilltop Hoods. The Atlantic itself cautioned that inclusion in a dataset is not definitive proof a song was used. LAION, the German nonprofit behind it, says the collection holds links and metadata rather than audio and warns against commercial use, according to Music Business Worldwide.

So the dataset evidence is circumstantial. Lyrics a model can recite are harder to wave away, and a European court has already ruled on that kind of proof. In November 2025, the Regional Court of Munich found that OpenAI models had memorized song lyrics represented by the German collecting society GEMA and that this memorization was a reproduction under copyright law, according to Verfassungsblog. The ruling is not yet final.

Australia's own collecting society has been loud about it since June. "These are not bargaining chips, they are the life's work of Australian and New Zealand songwriters," APRA AMCOS chief executive Dean Ormston said, per Rolling Stone Australia.

How Did the Australia AI Copyright Debate Reach an Opt-Out Plan?

Australia already said no once. In August 2025, the Productivity Commission floated a text and data mining exception for AI training, and in October 2025 Attorney-General Michelle Rowland shut it down. "We are making it very clear that we will not be entertaining a text and data mining exception," she said, according to CMU.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went further in a July speech at the University of Sydney. "No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist's control," he said. "That includes the artist's control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft."

Then came the leak. In September, the ABC reported on an Attorney-General's Department document setting out two options, both built on opt-out. Under one, AI firms could train on anything not opted out if they paid into a central body or licensed it through collecting societies. Under the other, they would earn that right by striking deals with a minimum number of rightsholders, with nothing paid to anyone outside those deals, per MBW.

The leak landed the same week OpenAI vice president of global policy Ann O'Leary said the company had concerns about investing in Australia because of its copyright restrictions, according to Region.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said "Big AI is holding a gun to the Albanese Government's head," while Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash said the proposals "flip the most basic principle of the Copyright Act 1968 on its head," according to Region. Neither option is government policy yet.

Why Is Australia's Creative Sector Split on the Fix?

In mid-October, the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence's Labor chair Jo Briskey and Liberal deputy chair Jonathon Duniam wrote to Albanese urging the government to "examine current copyright settings" so that creators keep control and get paid. Their letter said current arrangements are "not facilitating" licensing deals, according to the Canberra Times. Independent Senator David Pocock questioned whether the Prime Minister's office had pre-vetted the letter. Both co-chairs denied interference.

The recording industry rejected the premise outright. ARIA and PPCA chief executive Annabelle Herd called the co-chairs' statement "wrong" and pointed to 27 AI licensing agreements struck so far, per AI Musicpreneur. Australian copyright law, she said, "is the only thing standing between major American AI companies and unchecked access to the world's content."

That disagreement matters more than it looks. If the law is already producing licenses, then rewriting it hands AI developers a discount at exactly the moment the market for training data is forming.

The AI companies made their case to that committee on October 6. Jeff Bleich, Anthropic's international special envoy and a former US ambassador to Australia, said the company was not trying to dictate terms, then laid out the problem as Anthropic sees it. "You can't license the entire internet," he said, adding that under existing Australian law, training "could be determined to be illegal if we weren't able to find a license with every single person who had rights within Australia," according to Music Business Worldwide.

OpenAI head of economic policy Adam Cohen argued that US fair use "fundamentally protects" new technology and pointed to the company's content deals with News Corp and the Guardian.

Herd, testifying the same day, put it more bluntly. OpenAI and Anthropic, she said, were "asking Government for a free ride." Those positions cannot both shape the final policy.

What Are the UK, EU, Canada and US Doing About AI Training?

The UK tried opt-out and retreated. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in March 2026 that the government no longer has a preferred option after only 3% of more than 10,000 consultation respondents backed the opt-out model, according to The Next Web. Campaigners Beeban Kidron and Ed Newton-Rex are now warning Australia not to repeat it.

Europe sits closest to what Australia is considering. A 2019 EU directive already permits commercial text and data mining unless rightsholders opt out, per MBW, and the European Commission has been consulting on which machine-readable opt-out signals AI providers must honor under the AI Act, according to the Society for Computers and Law. Japan and Singapore adopted broader exceptions in 2018 and 2021.

Canada has stalled. Its June 2026 national AI strategy runs 50 pages without using the word "copyright," even after an April House of Commons report called for stronger consent and licensing requirements, according to McCarthy Tétrault. In the US, the fight is in the courts. The Justice Department filed a statement in September backing a fair use defense for training in The New York Times' case against OpenAI, per IPWatchdog, while the Third Circuit rejected fair use for AI training in Thomson Reuters v. Ross, a ruling explicitly limited to non-generative AI, per Music Business Worldwide.

The Investment Threat Is the Tell

Phelan says 62 countries have weighed changes and none of the other 61 has introduced a new commercial text and data mining exception. "The world is very much watching what Australia does," he said, per Digital Music News. That is why the stakes outrun Australia's market size. A wealthy, English-speaking democracy adopting opt-out after its prime minister called unlicensed training theft would be a precedent other governments could cite.

The committee reports by November 30. Albanese has already set the standard he will be measured against, in his own words, and an opt-out scheme that makes artists chase their rights would be very hard to square with "the artist's control."