Anthropic asks Australia's AI inquiry for 'conditional approval' of training on copyrighted works with a robots.txt opt-out; ABC and SBS push back
In submissions published Oct 1, 2026 to the Australian Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic proposed a "narrow form of conditional approval" for AI training on copyrighted works. Rights holders could opt out by blocking crawlers with robots.txt. The government had already ruled out a text-and-data-mining exception. Public broadcasters ABC and SBS argued that AI firms should pay for news, and SBS said "robots.txt mechanisms are routinely ignored or bypassed".
Key facts
- Forum: Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (Parliament of Australia); reported by Josh Butler, The Guardian, Oct 1–2, 2026
- Anthropic: a 'narrow form of conditional approval' with a robots.txt opt-out; says it is 'open' to supporting Australian creators
- The Albanese government had ruled out a broad text-and-data-mining exemption
- ABC: unequal treatment 'will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news' industry. SBS: 'the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing'
- Executives from Anthropic and OpenAI were due at the committee's Sydney hearings the following week; Altman and Amodei declined a separate Senate inquiry
What happened
Australia had rejected the broad training exemption that tech companies wanted. Anthropic's submission instead proposes an opt-out model similar to the EU's: training is allowed unless the rights holder blocks crawlers. Public broadcasters said this would leave rights holders policing an ever-changing set of bots.
Why it matters
Australia is one of the few jurisdictions that has explicitly refused a training exception. The inquiry is also the forum examining OpenAI's agent breach of Medicare systems, so the copyright debate and the agent-safety debate are now before the same committee.
Changelog
- 2026-10-01: created (sweep 2026-10-01, Techmeme/Guardian)
Related events
Sources (4)
- pressThe Guardian: Anthropic AI opt-out, Australia copyright, ABC warns of cannibalisation of news
- pressThe Next Web: ABC and SBS want AI firms to pay for news, as Anthropic seeks opt-out
- pressThe Next Web: Anthropic and OpenAI ask Australia to ease its ban on AI training with local content
- discussionTechmeme summary
id: 2026-10-01-anthropic-australia-copyright-opt-out-submission · updated 2026-10-01 · open in the interactive timeline