Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government is in intense negotiations with the White House to secure access for Australia’s critical infrastructure to AI models so powerful they have been restricted by the US over safety fears, according to three government officials. The talks could give the government and critical businesses susceptible to hacking, like banks and telcos, privileged access to top-tier AI models, such as Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos. The Trump administration abruptly restricted foreign access to these models last month over national security concerns and the discovery that they could be used to discover software vulnerabilities, with the ban lifted weeks later. The US has since created a voluntary review system for new models, and Australia is keen to be at the front of the queue for the broader release of these models and future models. Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei warned that his models “pose very real risks to cybersecurity, creating the potential for disruption of the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security,” adding in a June essay that “AI models are now tools of global and national strategic consequence.” Industry Minister Tim Ayres, the lead minister on AI, flagged investment in critical metals for AI chips and local AI models to make Australia “indispensable to our partners,” arguing the AI boom went beyond data centre investment and that “this is about Australian agency and making sure that Australia isn’t just a cork bobbing on the ocean in this technological contest.”