The International Confederation of Music Publishers has provided Guardian Australia with evidence that Google's Gemini can reproduce lyrics from Australian artists including Kylie Minogue, G-Flip, and Nick Cave — artists whose work the AI industry simultaneously claims was not used in training due to Australian copyright rules. That contradiction sits at the heart of what the ICMP calls an attempt to 'legitimise larceny.' The evidence also points to a dataset of more than 12 million songs pulled from YouTube videos — including tracks from Minogue, Cave, and Hilltop Hoods — reported by the Atlantic in June 2026. The mechanism is straightforward: AI companies train on copyrighted material, then lobby governments to retroactively legalise that training through text-and-data-mining exceptions or statutory licensing schemes. The ICMP has tracked this campaign across 62 countries. In 61 of them, the answer has been no. Australia is the outlier under active pressure. The leverage being applied is blunt. Anthropic's special envoy Jeffrey Bleich told the parliamentary AI committee that his company had shared information about 'what the implications would be with respect to our capacity to operate here' — diplomatic language for an investment threat. OpenAI's chief of economic policy Adam Cohen pointed to US fair-use doctrine as the model Australia should adopt, while acknowledging that his own company makes voluntary licensing deals with publishers including News Corp and the Guardian — deals that would become unnecessary if Australia changed its law. A joint letter from the inquiry's Labor chair Jo Briskey and Liberal deputy chair Jonathon Duniam this week recommended the government 'examine current copyright settings' — the kind of language that can mean anything, and which creative industries are reading as a warning sign. Independent senator David Pocock has raised the concern that a staffer edit trail in the letter suggests the committee's position may have been shaped by the prime minister's office before being formally issued. Briskey has rejected the claim, but the optics are poor for a government whose own prime minister said in July that using artists' work without consent or payment would be 'theft.' The ICMP's Phelan believes panic is driving the AI companies. The cost of frontier model development is enormous, US litigation over copyright is ongoing and unresolved, and a legislative safe harbour in any major jurisdiction would provide both precedent and operational cover. Australia, with an English-language creative sector and a government that has shown willingness to engage, looks like the path of least resistance. If Australia moves, the consequences extend well beyond its borders. Global music publishing contracts route through Australian law. A statutory scheme or compulsory licence imposed domestically would, according to the ICMP, interfere with how the Australian creative industry contracts internationally. The 'world is watching,' Phelan told Guardian Australia — and not as a rhetorical flourish. A precedent here would be cited in every subsequent legislative fight, in every jurisdiction where AI companies are still pushing. The 20-year version of this story is a creative economy where the terms of compensation for training data were set not by negotiation between rights holders and licensees, but by whichever government cracked first under investment pressure. The artists whose work built the models get a government-determined rate, if they get anything at all. The companies that built their products on that work retain the upside. Australia is being asked to be the test case.
