OpenAI and Anthropic put their copyright asks to Australia in writing
Australia's copyright fight stopped being a rumour this morning: the two labs asking Canberra to rewrite its law have now filed their arguments where anyone can read them.
OpenAI and Anthropic have filed submissions to parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence setting out what they want Australia's copyright regime to be — and both tie it to whether they train and build in the country. OpenAI asked for a "balanced copyright framework" that lets models learn from publicly available information, leaves room for deals with rights holders, and keeps protections against pirated material and infringing outputs; it did not say whether creators should be able to opt out, or whether developers should have to pay. Anthropic conceded more ground: it told the committee it has accepted it will not get US-style training exemptions, but that the government could instead create a payment system — one it says would unlock large infrastructure investment and pull Australian AI researchers home from Silicon Valley. The submissions were made public on Tuesday. Both companies argue that legal certainty determines where models get trained and where the computing that serves them gets built, which is the leverage they are actually spending.
The backdrop is a consultation document the government would clearly rather not be discussing in public. Screenshots of proposals titled "AI on Australian Terms," tabled in the Senate by independent senator David Pocock last week, set out two options for letting AI firms train on Australian material by default — one conditional on them striking deals with rights-holder organisations and collecting societies, the other gated on digital opt-outs. Under both, creators who want out would have to "digitally protect" their work. Shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash called it "a text and data mining exception with an opt-out bolted on," which is precisely the design the government said it had ruled out. The music licensing body APRA AMCOS put the objection shorter: "investment that is conditional on a country rewriting its property law is not investment." We covered the parallel standards consultation last week — Australia's AI standards: report rogue incidents, bring your own power — and copyright is the half of that package where the money is.
Morphotonics, a Dutch company that has spent 12 years building nanoimprint lithography for display optics, raised 40 million euros to scale production and push into optical components for data centres. The round was backed by 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM, Invest-NL, the European Innovation Council Fund and the European Investment Bank. Its stamps pattern glass and film into waveguides — the light-guiding layer inside Meta's Ray-Ban Display and Magic Leap headsets — and a next-generation machine now in build is rated at more than 6 million waveguides a year, shipping early next year. The data-centre half is the interesting one: co-packaged optics moves traffic between servers as light instead of copper, and that interconnect is where AI clusters hit power and reach limits. Morphotonics has not shipped a machine into that market yet and says only that customers have validated the technology — so read this as a supply-chain signal, not a product.
What to watch: whether Anthropic's submission is published with the same level of detail as OpenAI's, and whether the government's final model lands closer to a licence with a payment rail — which is what both labs are now asking for, one explicitly and one implicitly.
If a country can be asked to rewrite its copyright law as a condition of investment, what should it be asking for in return? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Capital Brief · Australian Financial Review · Parliament of Australia — Joint Select Committee on AI submissions · Information Age · TechCrunch · Crypto Briefing
