Stop the World

In this episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass series, the United States Studies Centre's Olivia Shen leads a panel discussion with Andrew Hastie, Shadow Minister for Industry and Sovereign Capability, Louise Stigwood, Managing Director of Public Sector for ANZ at Amazon Web Services and Nicholas Davis, Industry Professor of Emerging Technology at the Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

AI sovereignty was a dominant feature of the conference and remains highly contested in the context of how Australia and other nations can retain a level of control over their technology and future without having a frontier company of their own.

There is no uniform agreement on what AI sovereignty means — does it require designing, building, training and maintaining AI entirely in Australia, or can it be achieved through collaboration with allies and partners?

The panel discusses what they mean when talking about sovereignty, Australia’s interests in the US winning the frontier race against China and how much Australia should invest in AI, including data centres. They also consider what level of regulation is required and why resilience is essential to prepare for a future AI-related crisis.

Global shipping is vital to economics and security. We have seen it in relation to Russia’s war on Ukraine and we have felt it globally with the disruption to the Hormuz Strait.

With years of sanctions and international condemnation, it should have people asking how these nations have continued to get so much money through oil production.

In this episode of Stop the World, David Wroe interviews Michelle Wiese Bockmann, Senior Maritime Intelligence Analyst at Windward, a maritime AI company.

Michelle is an expert in what is commonly known as the shadow fleet – the use of networks of vessels to circumvent sanctions. Michelle has been tracking the global shadow fleet since 2019 and its rise from only a few vessels to thousands.

As Michelle sets out, clearly efforts to deal with the shadow fleet have not been effective and there are impacts on global shipping, consumer costs and security.

Michelle and Dave also discuss the more effective measures the US and its partners in the Gulf are taking to overcome Iran’s closure of the Hormuz Strait. That success, notes Michelle, is the cause of Iran increasing its attacks on vessels, fearing that it is losing what has been such significant leverage over the US and globe. Interestingly, Michelle’s best case scenario for the next year is that Hormuz ends up like the Red Sea, where you only get through if you’re willing to take the risk or have a deal with Iran.

Michelle and Dave also talk about the potential for other shipping routes, Ukraine’s success in targeting Russian refineries and how the nations which believe in freedom of navigation and international rules can work together to make sure the chokehold Iran has had over the world doesn’t happen again.

Europe is rearming, but can it build the defence industrial capacity it needs to stand on its own two feet?

In this episode of Stop the World, David Wroe speaks with Kristijonas Vizbaras, co-founder of Lithuanian defence technology company Brolis, about Europe's changing security landscape and the lessons of Russia's war on Ukraine.

Kristijonas explains why Lithuania and its neighbours are preparing for war without panic, and how Brolis has built a defence technology business with supply chains designed to avoid dependencies outside Europe.

They discuss China's dominance of the drone supply chain, what the war in Ukraine is teaching Europe's defence industry, why Kristijonas believes Europe has the industrial strength to become far more self-reliant – and lessons for Australia.

It's a conversation about resilience, innovation and what it really takes to prepare for an increasingly dangerous world.

In this episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass, Politico Australia's Ryan Heath interviews Anthropic International Special Envoy, Jeff Bleich.

AI safety was a key theme of the interview. And continued a common theme from the frontier labs of proactively seeking government intervention into the sector, vastly different to the social media pioneers who demanded government stay out of their business. Jeff says that ideally pacing frontier AI doesn’t just mean preventing the AI capability from getting too far ahead of safety but not ahead at all. 

Jeff and Ryan talk about recent AI cyber incidents, which Jeff says should be acted upon quickly but not through an alarmed panic, and rather as a healthy wake up call.

Jeff talks about the need to have the frontier companies and governments working closely to work out what reasonable regulation is, including published safety plans and independent evaluators.

Jeff also talks about the importance of developing AI consistent with democratic principles, and that means not only examining our own settings but needing to work out what our adversaries would seek to do with AI to harm us.

In the next episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass series, Justin Bassi speaks to Abi Bradshaw, Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate.

The discussion explores how the capabilities of AI models have evolved over the past six months and how frontier models can be used to protect Australia’s national security, including in cyber defence.

Abi shared her views on the need for governments to grapple with the technology, noting that cybersecurity and AI are not a spectator sport and that “the only way you can engage in this contest is to run into it.” She noted that what’s missing in the AI context right now is an early warning system to identify systemic trends and prevent, or detect earlier, future incidents such as the Hugging Face hack.

The conversation also covers the offence-defence balance in cyberspace as AI is rolled out, Project Glasswing and how governments are working with industry big and small to enhance their cybersecurity and why it’s important for Australia to maintain access to the most powerful models. They also discuss Australia’s “legacy technology debt” and the need for legacy tech to be replaced to address cyber vulnerabilities.

Watch other TSD AI Masterclass sessions: https://www.youtube.com/user/ASPICanberra 

Subscribe to ASPI’s Cyber & Tech Digest on Substack: https://aspicts.substack.com/

On 14 September, ASPI hosted its Sydney Dialogue Artificial Intelligence Masterclass in Canberra. We’re bringing some of the sessions to Stop the World listeners in the coming weeks.  

In this episode, David Wroe speaks with Ann O’Leary, Vice President of Global Policy at OpenAI. They discuss AI safety, the impact of the Hugging Face hack and the role of third-party evaluators. They also discuss Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a slowdown and the significance of his statement on the need to pace the frontier. 

The conversation explored the need for the US and China to come together to discuss AI safety and guardrails and the expectations being placed on last week’s summit between President Trump and Xi. It also focused on the role middle powers can and should play in policy conversations, and what Australia can do to both influence global conversations on AI and attract AI investment.

Note: This conversation was recorded at the AI Masterclass in Canberra on 14 September.

On 14 September, ASPI hosted its Sydney Dialogue Artificial Intelligence Masterclass in Canberra, and in the coming weeks, we're bringing some of the sessions to Stop the World listeners.

In this episode, David Wroe sits down with Australia’s Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, the Hon Dr Andrew Charlton MP. Their conversation reflects on the pace of AI development, whether Australia is prepared for machines that are smarter than humans, and why global efforts on AI safety matter.

The conversation also considers the different scenarios being discussed by AI leaders and experts and the likelihood of potentially catastrophic risks. The discussion explores what the government is doing to prevent those risks and protect Australians while making sure the country doesn't miss out on the economic opportunities of this technology, including through AI infrastructure investment. 

Dave asks the Assistant Minister about the government's five expectations of data centres and AI infrastructure developers. They also cover the government's focus on developing and attracting talent in Australia and investing in Australia's supply chains.

For more analysis on AI, subscribe to ASPI’s Substacks:

• ASPI Cyber and Tech Digest 
• AI Under Heaven

AI safety and security is now one of the global stories of the year. This week it landed with a thud on Australia’s doorstep with the news that AI agents being tested by OpenAI breached a closed area of a Medicare website and accessed non-public health Australian statistics, though not personal data.

Justin Bassi speaks with David Wroe on the implications of the breach, the wider issue of AI risk and safety, the knotty problem of coordinating greater safety between the US and China even at the expense of the speed at which new models are developed, and the tea leaves floating out of the summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington.

The AI news is coming thick and fast. OpenAI and Anthropic have called for the industry to pace its development, and to slow down if necessary so safety research can catch up, amid warnings from frontier researchers about the risks posed by increasingly powerful systems. But US President Donald Trump and his allies have ridiculed the idea that AI could threaten humanity, arguing the priority is staying ahead of China. With Beijing also pouring cold water on the idea, a coordinated slowdown looks unlikely to feature when Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping later this month.

Fresh from ASPI's AI Masterclass, STW is joined by two leading China AI experts: Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Alex Colville, a China AI analyst at ASPI. They discuss what to expect from the Trump–Xi meeting, China's strategic goals for AI, and the controversial practice of distillation, in which companies take a shortcut by training their models on the outputs of rival models. They also unpack China's approach of releasing models with open weights, which makes them cheap to acquire and easy to download and modify. And they examine recent safety incidents, including the attack on Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI agents, along with other serious risks.

David Galligan is Chief Defence Scientist and head of Defence Science & Technology with the New Zealand Defence Force. He was a keynote speaker at the recent ADSTAR Summit, held by the Defence Science and Technology Group, which hosted STW as podcast partner.

David explains how his team sits between military operators and the technology creators in industry, universities and research institutes, acting as a bridge with ideas flowing in both directions. He also explains why that balance is shifting now that so much innovation happens in the private sector.

He talks about New Zealand's strengths, the balance between fundamental research and later-stage practical capabilities, the challenge of knowing where to concentrate your efforts, and his team's role in growing a sovereign industry in New Zealand. And of course, he gives his perspective on artificial intelligence.

It's been an extraordinary fortnight in AI, with major breakthroughs making the technology more powerful while the safeguards struggle to keep up. We'll be digging into all of it at ASPI's AI Masterclass on Monday 14 September. Check out the line-up on our website.