Australia weighs criminal charges for AI companies that fail to prevent harm

Australia's federal government is considering a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harmful conduct by their models, alongside an AI safety watchdog able to issue significant fines, as part of its response to September's OpenAI Medicare statistics hack. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government accepted all recommendations of the incident review, one of which was to consider criminal-law reform options including a failure-to-prevent offence. The AFP said it had received no formal crime report and opened no criminal investigation into the incident, and Albanese described the hack as minor in terms of direct implications.