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

Australia's federal government announced it will consider a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harmful conduct by their models, along with an AI safety watchdog empowered to issue significant fines, as part of its response to September's OpenAI Medicare statistics hack. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the law needs to get ahead of a fast-changing world, while the AFP said it had received no formal report of a crime and had begun no criminal investigation into the incident. No other country has created a criminal offence centred on AI companies needing to take reasonable steps to prevent harm.