Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the country’s National AI Plan and associated measures that position AI as a strategic growth industry, backed by targeted public funding, infrastructure standards, and new central governance structures such as an Office of AI under the prime minister and cabinet. He claimed a “world-leading” national framework that is intended to attract AI investment and imposes guardrails on data centers, public‑sector use of AI, and copyright use for training foundation models.

The plan takes a “strategy‑plus‑standards” and largely technology‑neutral approach to governing aspects of AI applications within Australia’s boundaries. This certainly contrasts with the EU AI Act’s prescriptive, horizontal, risk‑based regulation with extraterritorial obligations and formal market‑access conditions. For providers serving both markets, governance calibrated to the EU AI Act will generally overshoot Australian requirements, with Australia adding some distinctive infrastructure sustainability and creator protection elements rather than creating a full AI‑Act analogue.

The strategy positions Australia as a regional hub for sustainable AI infrastructure and explicitly links industry policy to infrastructure, skills pipelines, and export‑oriented AI services. At its center is the consolidation of more than A$460 million in existing AI‑related government funding into a single industrial strategy aimed at growing a “world‑class AI ecosystem,” intended to capture economic opportunities arising from the implementation of AI applications. This includes over A$360 million in research grants, A$47 million for the Next Generation Graduates Program, and A$40 million to expand the National Artificial Intelligence Centre and industry‑adoption initiatives. The funding sits alongside broader government-funded technology and industrial policy instruments, such as an additional A$1 billion under the National Reconstruction Fund for “critical technologies” and substantial AI‑related research and development tax incentive claims. Nonetheless, foreign investment is courted and will be necessary for development of high-cost infrastructure such as data centers.

A key—and politically visible—strand of the plan is a national framework for AI‑relevant data centers, with principles and eventual legislation to govern sustainability and resource use. Large AI data centers will be required to generate as much power as they consume and to meet stringent water‑efficiency expectations, effectively imposing energy and water guardrails tied to AI growth. Government-developed national data‑center principles will also set expectations on other factors attending environmental and community impacts. This attempts to reconcile local resistance to energy‑intensive data centers with the desire to host large‑scale AI infrastructure.

A notable element is a strong stance on copyright and training data: Albanese declared that creators of books, music, art, and news “should retain control of the price and value of their work” when used to train AI, and that “anything less is theft.” He signaled that forthcoming national AI standards will include protections for creative professionals whose works are ingested into AI models, though the precise mechanisms and enforcement architecture are yet to be detailed. This marks a linkage between AI industrial policy and cultural‑sector bargaining power, situating creator compensation as part of AI’s social license rather than as a purely IP‑law question. How this will interface with existing copyright, contract, and collective‑bargaining frameworks remains to be worked through.

Institutionally, the new Office of AI will sit at the heart of government to manage development of AI standards and coordinate policy across ministries. This echoes earlier reliance on existing privacy, consumer, and sectoral laws, plus voluntary AI ethics guidelines, but signals a shift toward more centralized governance without (yet) relying on EU-style legislative intervention. Unlike the EU—more like the US approach—coordination of standards and policy will be centrally controlled, but supervision remains with existing regulators using their general powers rather than on any special ex ante AI regulatory powers.

The Albanese announcement apparently recasts Australia’s AI stance from a largely “existing‑law-plus-voluntary-principles” approach toward a more coherent AI industry strategy with central coordination, significant public co‑investment, and new hard‑law obligations on infrastructure and foreign AI companies utilizing Australian creative content. The policy mix is explicitly dual tracked: On the one hand, it seeks to attract foreign AI and data‑center capital and build a domestic export‑oriented AI ecosystem; on the other, it promises tighter constraints around environmental externalities, public‑sector decision‑making, and uncompensated use of cultural works.

But is Australia’s AI plan really world leading? It certainly differs from the EU approach to AI governance, but copyright issues aside, it is not clear that it differs from what is occurring in the United States: Centralized funding and control of industrial policy direction are occurring at state level as AI infrastructure and applications are deployed. Arguably, given the scale of the Australian economy, the incentives to protect that economy from competitive rivals and to grow it where possible to take advantage of what new technologies offer position it remarkably like, say, Louisiana or Arkansas in its AI policy approach.