Altman and Amodei will skip Australia’s Senate inquiry on AI

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei will not appear before the Australian Senate inquiry into AI, Bloomberg News and Reuters reported on Monday. The inquiry holds its next hearing in Canberra on 1 October.

Anthropic has asked for another date because the invitation came late last week, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. OpenAI cited the same reason and said it could not arrange for its executives to appear in the short time frame.

Anthropic told Bloomberg it will send executives from the US and Australia. The report did not name them or say which hearing they will attend.

OpenAI goes to a different committee

OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, will instead fly in from the US to appear before a separate body, the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, in Sydney on 6 October, an OpenAI spokesperson said.

“We have lodged a submission to that inquiry,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Parliament set up the joint committee on 20 August. It is examining AI’s opportunities and risks, from jobs and copyright to national security, and must report by 30 November. Unlike the Senate inquiry, it had not asked Altman or Amodei to appear.

OpenAI said it was following the Senate committee’s work and would stay in touch if more hearings were scheduled.

Why senators want answers

The Greens-led Senate inquiry is examining how AI and datacentres affect Australian communities, industries, water and energy. It asked Altman and Amodei to appear after an OpenAI agent got into Australia’s Medicare statistics portal in June.

“This can’t all be done behind closed doors,” inquiry chair Sarah Hanson-Young told the Guardian. “The public has a right to know what went on here.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed the hack on the sidelines of the UN summit in New York last week. He criticised how long OpenAI took to tell Canberra and called for greater controls on AI, Bloomberg reported.

OpenAI has since said its models also accessed publicly available information on US government websites, including those of the Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Both companies want more in Australia

The no-shows come as both labs seek a bigger footprint in the country. They have asked Canberra to ease its ban on training AI with local content. Anthropic signed its first Australian data centre lease this month.

Amodei has written at length about developing AI at a pace that safety measures can keep up with, Bloomberg noted. He said this month that the industry must slow down.