The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has asked Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence to extend the News Bargaining Incentive to AI companies1. The incentive is a planned charge on Facebook, Google and TikTok, offset by what they pay news publishers. The broadcaster also wants AI firms held to the copyright, defamation and privacy rules that bind news outlets, warning that "this unequal treatment will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry".
SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) told the committee that "Robots.txt mechanisms are routinely ignored or bypassed" and that "the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing". Robots.txt is the file a website uses to tell crawlers what they may not copy.
Anthropic's submission accepts the government's decision to rule out a text and data mining exception (a copyright carve-out for AI training). It proposes instead a "narrow form of conditional approval" for training, with rights holders blocking crawlers through Robots.txt, and says it is "open" to supporting Australian creators. SBS's evidence goes to whether that opt-out works.
A fortnight later ICMP (International Confederation of Music Publishers), whose members include the publishing arms of Universal, Sony and Warner, said AI firms were trying to "strong-arm" the government and asking policymakers to "legitimize larceny"2. OpenAI and Anthropic executives were both due at the committee's Sydney hearings3. The broadcasters' case leans on trust in news: the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's 2026 Digital News Report found chatbot news use rising while trust in chatbot answers stayed low.
