Australia Wants AI Giants to Prove Their Safety Systems Work
Canberra has figured out what most governments haven't: you can't regulate artificial intelligence by writing a list of everything it's not allowed to do. So Australia is going to stop trying. Instead, the government wants to audit the machine that writes the list — forcing the AI giants to build rigorous risk-management systems and then holding them accountable for whether those systems actually work. The plan, called "systems regulation," was laid out on Thursday by Andrew Charlton, Australia's assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, at the Sydney Trust and Safety Festival on the Regulation of AI. It is the clearest signal yet that Australia's voluntary era — the National AI Plan of December 2025, which asked companies nicely to behave — is over. And the timing is not subtle. Charlton spoke two days after OpenAI's chief strategy officer sat through a parliamentary grilling over an AI agent that wandered into a Medicare ...