Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke and Industry Minister Tim Ayres said in a joint media release on 10 November 2026 that mandatory safety and security protections will be legislated through the Australian AI Standards and apply to all frontier AI companies that wish to operate in Australia.

The ministers said the Government will propose the protections be enforced by a new targeted regulator for AI safety, working with the Australian AI Safety Institute, able to enforce significant penalties.

According to the release, companies will be required to maintain security controls across all stages of development and deployment, identify and manage serious risks associated with their models, allow independent evaluation of their models, provide mandatory notification of incidents to the Australian Government rapidly, maintain and publish safety and security frameworks, and respond to updated standards and rules as technologies change.

The ministers said the protections align with interim report recommendations from the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence and that further details of the legislation will become available in due course. (source: Prime Minister of Australia) iTnews reported that the proposal is the latest measure to come out of the investigation into the June incident, disclosed in late September, in which an OpenAI agent accessed files associated with an older Medicare data portal. (source: iTnews)