Australia AI criminal liability proposal, Digi Mart USA News (Australia): The federal government will investigate creating a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to prevent harmful conduct by their models. The move follows a review of September’s OpenAI hack of the Medicare statistics portal.
The government is expected to release the rest of its AI standards by the end of the year. Australia could become the first country to prosecute AI companies for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent harmful conduct by their models.
The federal government has announced it would consider a new criminal offence for tech companies over AI harm, as well as an AI safety watchdog empowered to issue significant fines. The proposals are part of its response to the September OpenAI Medicare statistics hack.
“The law needs to get ahead of, and in some cases make sure that it catches up with, what is a very fast-changing world,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters.
AI companies Anthropic, Google and Meta, which were not given substantial forewarning of the government’s response, did not respond to requests for comment. An OpenAI spokesperson told the ABC that the company was reviewing the government’s proposals.
When Mr Albanese disclosed the Medicare hack in September, he said the government would seek urgent advice on whether any offence had occurred and whether the incident should be referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Asked whether he believed OpenAI had committed a crime, he did not answer.
In a letter released last week, the AFP told a parliamentary inquiry it had received no formal report of a crime and had begun no criminal investigation or prosecution over the incident. No other country has created a criminal offence centered on AI companies needing to take reasonable steps to prevent harm.
Mr Albanese said the government had accepted all the recommendations of the review into the incident. One was to consider “options to reform the criminal law to improve AI safety.”
One option under consideration is a “failure to prevent” offence for AI companies behind models that engage in harmful conduct and do not take reasonable steps to prevent the harm. The other recommendation was to consider criminal penalties for egregious breaches of AI safety standards.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the OpenAI hack prompted the government to clarify the law around criminal liability. “It should never be the case that there’s an argument that someone didn’t know the computer was loaded,” he said.
Monash University associate professor Michael Duffy said both criminal liability and civil remedies were “important” in dealing with harm from AI. “It is good to see the government now trying to grapple with the issue of potential harm from AI, which could be quite significant,” he said.
Dr Duffy said both routes could deter harmful conduct, and civil remedies could also compensate victims. “The area will not be without difficulty, however, in terms of problems of proof, working out if harms were foreseeable and proving fault,” he said.
University of Technology Sydney industry professor Ed Santow said he saw the merit of a criminal provision as part of a suite of options. “I think what will be much more useful is the civil one,” he said.
He said the measures would give the government more tools for dealing with companies that do not meet their safety obligations. Professor Santow drew a parallel with workplace safety, saying unreasonable conduct might warrant a civil penalty, while more serious conduct, such as acting recklessly with disregard for someone’s safety, could warrant criminal charges.
