Kylie Minogue AI training has already happened, according to the body representing music publishers worldwide: her songs, along with those of other Australian artists, sit inside AI training datasets used without any compensation. The International Confederation of Music Publishers warns Australia is weighing the kind of copyright change every other country has refused.

The confederation, which represents Sony, Warner and Universal along with thousands of independent publishers across six continents, says Australia appears to be the only one of dozens of countries approached to water down copyright laws that is considering doing so.

Australian artists' works in training data

According to the ICMP, the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave have been used to train AI systems with no payment to them. Its managing director, John Phelan, pointed to spreadsheets containing millions of lines of music available on YouTube that AI companies have used to train their models.

In demonstrations provided to Guardian Australia, the confederation showed that Google's Gemini could reproduce lyrics from Australian artists including Minogue, G-Flip and Nick Cave. Google was approached for comment.

Phelan also cited an AI training dataset reported by the Atlantic in June, which contained more than 12m songs pulled from YouTube videos, among them tracks from Minogue, Cave and Hilltop Hoods.

Publishers accuse tech firms of strong-arming Canberra

Phelan said 62 countries had considered making their own legal changes, but none of the others had bought into AI companies' demands, and that no other country had introduced a new text and data mining exception for commercial purposes or reduced exclusive copyright rights.

Phelan said that of AI companies, in his words asking policymakers to "legitimise larceny".

In his assessment, panic had set in among AI companies over the sheer cost of investment, the need to make a return and ongoing US copyright litigation, and they may be seeking a legislative solution in Australia to do business without licences. He said the world is very much watching what Australia does, and that the global music and creative industries are appalled by the idea of a statutory scheme or government deal interfering with Australian industries' international contracting.

Music, film, media and news organisations had voiced concerns that the government was being lobbied by global tech companies behind closed doors to weaken Australia's copyright laws without compensating creative sectors.

AI companies' case to the committee

Anthropic's special envoy, Jeffrey Bleich, told the committee the company was not trying to dictate terms, but had shared information with the Australian government about what training would mean for its capacity to operate in Australia.

Bleich told the committee. He added that under his company's understanding of existing Australian law, training could be determined to be illegal if Anthropic was not able to find a licence with every single person who held rights within Australia.

OpenAI's chief of economic policy, Adam Cohen, told the inquiry the fair use exception in US law fundamentally protects the development of new technology. He pointed to agreements with News Corp and the Guardian as examples of where the company makes deals for the use of work, despite arguing that US law does not require such deals.

Parliamentary committee sees a stalemate

The inquiry has become a political fight inside the parliament itself:

• •This week, government and opposition members of the parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence described the current situation as a stalemate.
• •Members said AI models already train on copyrighted works in the US without paying creators, but companies were withholding training of frontier AI models in Australia pending local law changes.
• •In a joint letter to the prime minister this week, committee chair Jo Briskey and deputy chair Jonathon Duniam recommended the government examine current copyright settings while ensuring creators retain control and are paid.
• •Independent senator David Pocock raised concerns that the committee's copyright position had been predetermined by the prime minister, after staffer edits were seen in the letter; Briskey rejected the claim.

The prime minister has spoken on the issue before: at a July appearance, Anthony Albanese described it as "theft" when artists are left without control over whether their work builds and trains AI, or over what they are paid for it.