QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (15:49): I move: That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Industry and Innovation (Senator Ayres) to a question without notice I asked today relating to artificial intelligence. It's really of no comfort that the minister's first instinct is to downplay the incident, given what we've seen with the Hugging Face incident in the US and what we've seen with bots breaking out of testing environments and OpenAI having no idea that this was happening until after the fact.

It seems like we're in a situation now where we potentially have to pay OpenAI to have access to a program to help protect us from OpenAI. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I would love to see the minister have more answers in his answers to Senate questions generally but, specifically, more answers when it comes to AI and the threat of AI.

The government has not been able to answer why they put on hold, or shelved, an AI safety act that had started consultation in 2024.This is not a new issue. We've known for many years that we need safeguards in place. The government said: 'We don't need safeguards.

We're basically just going to see how this plays out.' It's not playing out that well. Now they're scrambling. They did the same thing on data centres, where they said: 'We have standards.

They're on a website. Check them out'—and it was basically all the existing regulations that they'd put on a website. It's not good enough.

They are now scrambling to put in national standards. People expect governments to be more proactive, to actually take on vested interests and to put Australians first, and I'm really concerned that we're not seeing that when it comes to artificial intelligence, given everything that is at stake. Question agreed to.