Australia’s AI choice: Standards setter or technology taker? | Lowy Institute
October 14, 2025
AI is not born neutral. The rules that govern how it behaves are set by its authors: corporations and governments embedding their own assumptions, priorities, and cultural defaults into code. Those rules travel with the system. If Australia adopts AI built to foreign specifications, we also import those embedded choices — about privacy, bias, autonomy, and control. We can avoid this dependency only by setting our own AI development guidelines, explicitly crafted to preserve sovereignty. That means writing the governance rules here, not just buying in systems and pretending we can retrofit “Australian values” later. The strategic choice is not whether to use AI, but whether to use someone else’s rules or our own.
Source: Australia’s AI choice: Standards setter or technology taker? | Lowy Institute
Will large language models, particularly the largest frontier models, be restricted to a handful of the largest, best-resourced labs in the world, closely associated with the largest, most powerful nations in the world, like the United States and China?
Or should other nations like Australia invest in their own sovereign models?
Here Ian Gribble explores the implications for a nation like Australia of the increasing importance of AI and large language models in the modern world.
@conffab.com Just wanted to highlight this point of view. Australia doesn't have the resources to build their own AI systems?