{"id":904708,"date":"2026-09-25T07:34:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T07:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904708\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T07:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T07:34:09","slug":"to-secure-frontier-ai-access-australias-best-bet-is-a-coalition-of-the-dependent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904708\/","title":{"rendered":"To secure frontier AI access, Australia\u2019s best bet is a coalition of the dependent"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

At Davos this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said<\/a> \u2018middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.\u2019<\/p>\n

Nowhere is the case stronger than in AI. Access to frontier AI \u2013 the most advanced AI systems \u2013 is a prerequisite for prosperity, and with no frontier model of its own, Australia is structurally dependent on the United States. But this dependence need not be passive.<\/p>\n

Instead of accepting whatever access arrangements the market and alliance deliver by default, Australia needs to move to deliberate managed dependence<\/a> within the US orbit. This means investment in strategic assets to ensure a significant enough stake across enough layers of the AI supply chain to negotiate ongoing, secure access to frontier AI.<\/p>\n

However, neither Australia nor any other middle power can alone occupy enough of the supply chain to hold a sufficiently strong negotiating hand. Australia therefore needs to do more to coordinate with like-minded partners, to form a coalition that pools complementary and scalable assets across the AI supply chain, building shared leverage to secure frontier AI access.<\/p>\n

The good news is that middle powers already hold, or have the capacity to hold, real assets across the AI supply chain.<\/p>\n

At the base of the chain, in the raw inputs AI hardware needs, Australia and Canada have important deposits of critical minerals outside China\u2019s control.<\/p>\n

Further up the supply chain, in chipmaking, the Netherlands\u2019 ASML is the world\u2019s only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (needed to make the world\u2019s most advanced chips), with Germany\u2019s Zeiss the sole supplier of their optics and Trumpf providing their lasers. Japanese firms make half<\/a> the world\u2019s silicon wafers and the specialised chemicals used to print circuits onto them. South Korea\u2019s Samsung and SK Hynix make about two-thirds<\/a> of the world\u2019s memory chips and more than 80 percent<\/a> of the high-bandwidth memory. And British semiconductor company Arm, which is majority-owned by Japan\u2019s SoftBank, designs the blueprints for the supporting processors that work alongside Nvidia\u2019s most powerful AI chips.<\/p>\n

As for computing power, Australia\u2019s vast land, abundant renewable energy and record of hosting trusted infrastructure such as Pine Gap give it the potential<\/a> to host data centres big enough to train frontier AI models. Canada and European countries could also host a significant share of the world\u2019s AI data centres.<\/p>\n

On assurance, Britain\u2019s AI Security Institute is a global leader in pre-deployment evaluations of frontier models, bolstered by comparable institutes across several other partners. Middle powers could also build up independent third-party evaluators, diversifying testing capacity beyond the handful of US organisations that dominate the field.<\/p>\n

The task for Australia now is to realise the potential of its national assets, and to coordinate a trusted group of like-minded countries to build coalition leverage. This bolsters the resilience of the US-led AI project while spreading ownership of the frontier AI supply chain across more players, so that dependence is less concentrated and allies hold a greater collective stake in the technology.<\/p>\n

In practice, such a coalition would primarily be a coordination mechanism, rather than a formal alliance. Coordination would centre on the terms that partners negotiated with the US, including establishing a common baseline for compute-for-access deals \u2013 that is, deals where middle powers condition fast-tracked data-centre approvals on model access terms. A common baseline would ensure no partner settled for less than access on par with US customers, rather than each negotiating alone and undercutting others on access conditions to compete for investment. Partners could also align positions in negotiating wider agreements with the US, such as the series of US bilateral Technology Prosperity Deals, which set terms for technology cooperation with priority US allies.<\/p>\n

The coalition would also maintain a shared assessment of the supply chain positions that partners already held \u2013 where they were vulnerable and where joint or individual investment would complement or scale the group\u2019s collective share of the AI supply chain.<\/p>\n

The obvious objection is how Washington would read such a coalition. President Donald Trump called<\/a> a proposal this month for Canadian associate membership of the EU a \u2018hostile act\u2019. He threatened tariffs if he judged it to be directed against the US. Any AI coalition Australia joined could draw similar suspicion, so its purpose must be unmistakable from the outset.<\/p>\n

This means making clear that the coalition\u2019s goal would be managed dependence under the US umbrella \u2013 sharing the burden of building the allied supply chain, reducing vulnerabilities in it, and securing allies\u2019 ongoing access to the technology that their own assets help produce. Australia\u2019s alignment with the US is already settled, and that alignment, far from costing sovereignty, is what gives Australia\u2019s assets their value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Davos this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said \u2018middle powers must act together because if you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[254,64,63,99473,472941,44,105],"class_list":["post-904708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cooperation","tag-middle-power","tag-news","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}