- On October 9, 2026, the Australian Financial Review reported that major Australian banks had proposed building “national AI infrastructure” to safeguard economic security and reduce dependence on foreign technology.
- During a parliamentary hearing, Westpac Chief AI Officer Dan Jermyn urged the government to make long-term sovereign AI capabilities a central pillar of its national strategy.
- Westpac warned that without domestic control over strategic stages of the AI value chain, much of the economic value generated could flow to the United States.
- Representatives from National Australia Bank stressed the need to develop data centres and the capacity to train advanced AI models within Australia.
- Commonwealth Bank proposed building computing infrastructure capable of training and fine-tuning advanced models using domestic data and expertise.
- The banks argued that domestic AI capabilities would help safeguard national security, strengthen economic resilience and limit dependence on foreign countries.
- Australia is considering regulations governing data centres and advanced AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
- The banking industry called for appropriate exemptions that would allow banks to continue using AI to detect fraud, scams and financial crime without having to disclose their entire operating methods.
- Debates over AI safety intensified following incidents involving OpenAI’s AI experiments connected to Hugging Face and Australia’s Medicare data system.
- OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon apologised for the Medicare incident and said the company had introduced additional mechanisms to monitor AI agent behaviour.
- The parliamentary committee is expected to issue policy recommendations by the end of November 2026.
📌 Australian banks view computing power, data and advanced AI models as strategic infrastructure tied to economic sovereignty. The focus is not merely on locating data centres domestically, but also on developing the capacity to train, fine-tune and operate models using domestic resources. However, the pursuit of AI sovereignty must go hand in hand with risk management and system security. Australia’s experience highlights the challenge of balancing the attraction of international technology, the development of national AI capabilities and the protection of security in critical sectors.
