September 15, 2026, 06:36 GMT | Insight
An Australian minister has said the government takes artificial intelligence safety challenges seriously while noting the role of the Australian AI Safety Institute. In an event on Monday in Canberra, Australia’s minister for industry and innovation, Tim Ayres, said that the AI Safety Institute is an important part of the Australian government's approach toward building capability, monitoring safety in the Australian context. He was responding to a question about concerns raised over the weekend by
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei about the risks associated with the rapid pace of AI development.
An Australian minister has said the government takes artificial intelligence safety challenges seriously while noting the role of the Australian AI Safety Institute.
In an event* on Monday in Canberra, Australia’s minister for industry and innovation, Tim Ayres, said that the AI Safety Institute is an important part of the Australian government's approach toward building capability, monitoring safety in the Australian context.
He said partnerships with the US, UK, Canada, Japan and South Korea were also an important element of the government’s AI-safety approach.
He was responding to a question about concerns raised over the weekend by Anthropic's chief executive officer Dario Amodei about the risks associated with the rapid pace of AI development.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in an essay published on his personal website.
Amodei said AI progress had accelerated sharply in recent months as systems increasingly help develop their own successors, a process known as “recursive” self-improvement. He warned that, if unchecked, this could outpace the ability of humans to understand and control AI systems, requiring an especially cautious approach.
In his speech at Monday’s event, Ayres also said that the safety risks posed by AI were “absolutely there,” but the policy challenge was to build Australia’s resilience and capability in an uncertain geopolitical environment.
Ayres’ comments also follow a call by the Australian Greens party for a pause on the construction of data centers.
In a statement on Monday, the party said that leading tech CEOs including Anthropic’s Amodei,
X Corp’s Elon Musk and
OpenAI’s Sam Altman have called for urgent action to slow down the arms race on AI, citing a threat to humanity.
“When the three leading CEOs of AI companies are telling you there’s a problem with the hyper speed of AI, it’s time for governments to listen,” said lawmaker Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens environment and communications spokesperson.
“Instead, the [Australian] government seems determined to roll out the welcome mat for the construction of dozens and dozens of data centers across Australia,” she added.
The Greens said data-center developers were operating without adequate rules and called for a pause on new projects while the government develops a regulatory framework. They argued that data centers were already consuming substantial energy and water without delivering sufficient benefits to communities.
“Unless we have a moratorium or a commitment that the future laws will be retrospective, it’s a green light to the industry to get in quick and build, build, build before the rules are put in place,” Hanson-Young said.
Separately, in an interview with Australia’s public broadcaster ABC on Sunday, Communications Minister Anika Wells said the government’s approach was to capture and share the technology’s benefits while keeping Australians safe, when asked whether Australia should support a slowdown in AI development.
Wells pointed to the proposed digital duty-of-care law, which would require platforms to identify and mitigate risks associated with AI chatbots, particularly harm to children (see
here).
While she did not directly respond to the slowdown questions, Wells said that decisions on AI development ultimately rested with the billionaires running major technology companies, while Australian lawmakers could regulate how those companies operate in Australia.
At Monday’s event, talking about possible rules for AI developers, Ayres said the government was closely watching overseas approaches, including risk-management and incident-reporting obligations.
However, he said Australia’s immediate legislative focus was on securing frontier-model training and data-center investment “on Australia’s terms,” while preserving copyright protections.
Ayres also warned against assuming AI would inevitably produce mass unemployment.
“There is some, I think, reliable work out there which indicates what is happening now in the Australian workforce and what is happening internationally, and it's remarkably consistent about the predominance of augmentation and changing workers' work rather than automation and robotics and replacement, but that doesn't mean that that is always going to be the case, and we should be alert to that,” he said.
The global AI-safety concerns and calls to slow data-center development come as the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee’s inquiry into AI and data centers, established in May, is scheduled to hold public hearings next week on the adequacy of existing regulation and the sector’s effects on communities, industry, energy, water and the environment.
* "Sydney Dialogue Artificial Intelligence Masterclass," Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra, Australia, Sept. 14, 2026
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