Anthropic was given a draft of Australia’s data centre guidelines while negotiating an agreement that required the artificial intelligence company to follow them, documents released under freedom of information laws show.
The guidelines, known as the data centre expectations, require developers of large facilities to put the national interest first. The federal government says they are intended to prevent data centres from driving up electricity bills.
They are not yet legally binding, but ministers plan to make them mandatory through national AI standards due to be legislated early next year. That could place Anthropic’s proposed Australian facilities under rules it saw before they were finalised.
An Industry Department briefing prepared five days before the expectations were published said officials had consulted Anthropic on their development. It said the company’s advice could change “pending the outcome of today’s meeting with Anthropic”, although the remainder of that passage was withheld.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company had received the draft “for consideration in the MOU” signed with the government on April 1. The spokesperson said: “It would be inaccurate to suggest we had any influence on the final data centre expectations.”
The government said it routinely consults industry, experts and other parts of government, and that Anthropic was one of several stakeholders involved. It said the company’s agreement to align with the expectations was a condition of finalising the memorandum, a position also taken in negotiations with Microsoft.
The memorandum is non-binding and says Anthropic will align its Australian operations with the expectations while upholding Australian laws and values. It also states that the agreement gives the company no preferential treatment in regulatory decisions or Commonwealth procurement.
Anthropic’s proposed Queensland campus
Anthropic now has a direct interest in how the guidelines are applied after leasing the first stage of a proposed 32 billion Australian dollar data centre campus in Western Downs, Queensland. The project still requires approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board.
At full capacity, the campus would use 2.16 gigawatts of power, equivalent to the average consumption of about 1.5 million Australian homes. Data centres currently account for about 3 per cent of demand on the national electricity grid, a figure forecast to reach 13 per cent within a decade.
Anthropic and the project’s developer said the campus would buy electricity from a combination of existing Queensland generators and new generation that would add more supply to the market than the facility used. They did not specify how much of the new supply would come from renewable sources.
Opposition to the development has been growing. Save Our Darling Downs has raised concerns about its energy use, while the Climate Council and Greenpeace have warned that it could increase reliance on coal and gas.
Treasury’s foreign investment policy, updated in May, says data centre proposals that comply with the expectations will be prioritised in the approval process where possible. Anthropic has also committed to paying its share of power generation and transmission costs in Australia, as it has in the United States.
The release of the documents has prompted questions about access to ministers and officials during the policy-making process. Following a meeting with Anthropic on March 12, an acting Industry Department general manager told a colleague to record a commitment to send the company a draft of the expectations.
The department later engaged an adviser to assess whether its arrangements with AI companies were fair and properly conducted. Before the Microsoft memorandum was signed, ministers were told the adviser had found “no material probity concerns with the process undertaken to date”.
Kate Griffiths, deputy director of democracy at the Grattan Institute, said lobbying could improve policy but warned that well-resourced organisations had greater access to decision-makers. She said politicians and public servants should seek a broader range of views when assessing the public interest.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs a Senate inquiry into AI and data centres, said companies that stood to benefit from Australia’s AI expansion should not be deciding the rules governing them. The Australian Council of Trade Unions has called for data centres to be required to produce more energy than they consume.
Public consultation on the national AI standards opened last month, with submissions due to close on Friday.
