Anthropic proposed conditional approval for AI companies to train models on Australian copyrighted works, with rights holders able to signal opt-outs through robots.txt. The proposal was made in a submission to an Australian parliamentary inquiry and is not an adopted policy.
Anthropic’s proposed opt-out for AI training
Anthropic suggested that websites use robots.txt files to tell crawlers not to access material for AI training. The company presented conditional approval with this opt-out approach as an alternative to a broad text-and-data-mining exception.
Why ABC and SBS challenge the approach
SBS argued that crawlers could ignore or bypass robots.txt signals, leaving rights holders with ongoing work to monitor and update protections. That is the broadcaster’s objection to the proposed mechanism.
ABC and SBS both called for AI companies to be included in Australia’s news bargaining incentive, which requires commercial deals with large media outlets to support journalism.
The ABC’s broader regulatory request
The ABC also called for AI companies to face the same copyright, defamation, and privacy rules as media outlets. Separately, the Australian Government’s reported position was that it had ruled out a broad text-and-data-mining exception.
