Anthropic seeks Australian AI copyright opt-out as public broadcasters call for tougher rules

Anthropic has urged Australia’s government to consider conditional approval for AI training on copyrighted works, The Guardian reported on 1 October 2026. The proposal would allow rights holders to signal that their online material must not be crawled. Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, say AI companies should face stronger obligations when they use news content. The dispute matters to publishers and other creators whose work could be used to train AI models without an individual licence.

The company’s request is a proposal, not an adopted change to Australian copyright law. According to The Guardian, Anthropic acknowledged that a broad text-and-data-mining exception had been ruled out by the government and put forward what it called a narrow form of ‘conditional approval’ instead. The report says Anthropic suggested ‘do not crawl’ signals in robots.txt files, which tell automated systems what they may access, and said it was open to supporting Australian creators.

How Anthropic’s proposed opt-out would work

Anthropic told the parliamentary AI inquiry that copyright settings should give developers legal certainty while advancing Australia’s cultural interests, according to The Guardian’s account of its submission. The proposed route would depend in part on rights holders marking material they do not want crawled. The available reporting does not establish the full conditions that would govern approval, how compliance would be checked or what remedy a creator would have if a signal were ignored.

That leaves a central practical question for publishers: whether an opt-out signal would reliably keep their work out of AI training. SBS disputed the proposed mechanism. The Guardian quoted its submission as saying robots.txt instructions are ‘routinely ignored or bypassed’ and that tracking changing training bots would place an increasing burden on rights holders. SBS argued that AI companies should bear the responsibility for avoiding improper use of protected material.

What the ABC and SBS want for news publishers

Both the ABC and SBS asked for AI companies to be included in Australia’s news bargaining incentive, according to The Guardian. The measure is intended to require major technology platforms to make commercial deals that support journalism. SBS also warned that large language models’ use of news without permission, attribution or compensation poses challenges to the industry’s sustainability, information integrity and public trust.

Their objections extend beyond a technical setting on a website. A publisher could face questions about payment and attribution even if it can signal that its material should not be crawled. The Guardian’s account of the broadcasters’ submissions shows why they want rules governing AI companies’ use of news, rather than relying solely on individual publishers to block access.

How earlier government copyright options differ

The debate follows separate consultation options described in an ABC News investigation published on 15 September. The ABC reported that Attorney-General’s Department slides presented two possible approaches to AI training on online material, both allowing copyright owners to opt out by default. Those were government consultation options reported by the ABC, not the conditional-approval proposal Anthropic later put to the parliamentary inquiry.

Under one option, the ABC reported, AI companies could train on material whose owners had not opted out if they paid a central body and met other conditions. A licensing route involving collecting groups was also described. Under the alternative, companies would have to make deals with a minimum number of rights-holder companies for a minimum period. The slides said there would be no additional payment to creators or rights holders beyond deals made to meet that quota.

The ABC said the consultation slides also proposed penalties for disregarding opt-outs, protections for Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, transparency and audit requirements, and efforts to avoid pirated material. An Attorney-General’s spokesperson told the ABC that the government was consulting creators, media organisations and AI companies on options intended to provide meaningful control and fair compensation. Independent senator David Pocock criticised the proposals, saying Australians should not carry the burden of defending rights in content they create or own.

What happens next in Australia’s AI inquiry

The Guardian reported that the parliamentary AI committee planned hearings in Sydney the following week, with executives from Anthropic and OpenAI expected to attend. As of the 1 October report, those hearings were still ahead. The retained reporting does not establish whether the government will adopt Anthropic’s request, either earlier consultation option or another approach. The questions for rights holders remain how an opt-out would be enforced, whether use of their work would be paid for and which obligations AI companies would face.