Australia: New Technology

Japan, as Australia’s fourth-largest foreign investor, has agreed to strengthen bilateral collaboration with Australia, including in the growing technology sector. This will facilitate closer collaboration between the two countries on critical technologies, artificial intelligence, digital ecosystems, research and development and cybersecurity.

New South Wales has introduced Australia's first express statutory duty directed at digital work systems, including algorithmic work allocation, performance metrics and worker surveillance. The Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 requires NSW Government agencies to proactively assess and manage risks arising from AI, algorithms and automated platforms used to allocate work.

On 12 May 2026, AUSTRAC released updated risk snapshots of money laundering (ML), terrorism financing (TF) and proliferation financing (PF) threats influencing Australia’s ML, TF and PF environment.

International cybersecurity authorities have released comprehensive guidance on the secure deployment of agentic AI systems, which autonomously reason, plan and execute actions with limited human intervention. The guide addresses critical security risks including inherited LLM vulnerabilities, expanded attack surfaces, and reduced accountability, while recommending organizations embed security controls from the outset and adopt a progressive deployment approach starting with lower-risk tasks.

Australia has introduced a prioritisation framework for data centre and AI compute projects through Commonwealth Expectations that will influence regulatory approvals and project sequencing.

Australia's fair dealing doctrine operates under strict statutory limitations, confining copyright exceptions to specific purposes like research, criticism, and news reporting. Unlike the more flexible approaches in Canada and the US, Australian law requires uses to fit within predefined categories, with courts showing little appetite for expansion despite ongoing debates about AI and data mining.

In a recent address, the President of Australia's Fair Work Commission (FWC) described a sharp, AI‑driven surge in applications, highlighting how large language models (LLMs) can produce ready‑to‑file claims within minutes...

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Investigations today are defined by complexity, scale, and increasing diversity of data sources. Investigators face the challenge of reviewing thousands – sometimes millions...