The federal government will investigate creating a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to prevent harmful conduct by their models.
It follows a review of September's OpenAI hack of the Medicare statistics portal.
The government is expected to release the rest of its AI standards by the end of the year.
Australia could become the first country to prosecute AI companies for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent harmful conduct by their models.
The federal government has announced it would consider a new criminal offence for tech companies over AI harm and an AI safety watchdog empowered to issue significant fines, as part of its response to September's OpenAI Medicare statistics hack.
"The law needs to get ahead of, and in some cases make sure that it catches up with, what is a very fast-changing world," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters yesterday.
AI companies Anthropic, Google and Meta, which were not given a substantial forewarning of the government's response, did not respond to requests for comment.
An OpenAI spokesperson told the ABC that the company was reviewing the government's proposals.
When Mr Albanese disclosed the Medicare hack in September, he said the government would seek urgent advice on whether any offence had occurred and whether the incident should be referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
