I applaud Anthony Albanese’s statement yesterday that Australia will not allow AI to be trained on artist’s works without their permission. In a major speech he said:

Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less is theft.

However there wasn’t any concrete detail on how this would be enforced. It won’t be easy to enforce because we’re already behind: almost all the AI in use today has been trained on copyrighted works without permission—theft, as the Prime Minster puts it. That’s a problem because even if we respect artist’s work from now on, the existing AI models based on their stolen work will still be around. As Albanese said:

No government can turn back the clock or press pause on all of this. Nor would we want to.

So what should we do about AI that has already stolen from us? I reckon we should take it back! I think the deal should be that if you take our work for free, then we get the ensuing AI model back for free.

Ideally that would mean AI models trained on stolen works should lose copyright protections. We would be allowed to take the AI models from Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Muse, etc and run them ourselves on our own equipment without paying anything to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc. Of course I don’t expect that to actually happen because there would be a mighty uproar if our government were to actually pursue that. The big tech firms would be outraged and the US government might threaten Australia (the biggest AI firms are all American), despite the obvious irony of thieves outraged about theft.

But all that is unnecessary because someone is already taking AI back from big tech firms: the Chinese AI labs, who are allegedly stealing American AI models on an industrial scale. The Chinese AI models such as GLM, DeepSeek, MiniMax, etc are very good; nearly as good as top American AI models, and occasionally beating them. Unlike most US tech firms, however, Chinese AI labs make their AI models available to download and use for free. So the Chinese AI labs are already doing what I think all AI companies should do: giving their AI back to the public that they took the data from.

Australian government could simply make it a requirement that government AI must use open-weight AI models, unless a proprietary AI model has been trained without stolen work. Given that so few models are free of stolen work that effectively means we would switch from proprietary American AI models to free Chinese AI models. This might sound scary to a Sinophobe but it would actually improve Australia’s sovereignty because it reduces the leverage any foreign government has over us. Right now the USA can take away our access to AI (as Trump did with Fable) or jack up prices, but if we run open weight AI models ourselves then neither USA nor China can stop us or surveil us.

The result would be that we stop rewarding AI companies who have stolen our work, and give them an incentive to seek out permission before training their next AI models. We render the upcoming laws to protect our artistic works meaningless if we continue to pay money to companies for AI based on stolen works; now is the time to stop doing that.