Senator David Shoebridge, the Greens' newly appointed spokesperson on artificial intelligence, has warned that Australia is on an "incredibly dangerous path" by allowing its economy and government services to run on a U.S.-owned tech stack without building sovereign alternatives. In a wide-ranging interview, he argued the current government approach amounts to "surrendering to a foreign-controlled industry" rather than shaping the nation's digital future.
A call for Australian-owned AI infrastructure
Shoebridge pointed to France's Mistral and South Korea's domestic AI efforts as models Australia should follow. He advocated for a national compute and large language model built through a public-private partnership.
"I think the best model we can see at the moment is some form of independent statutory model, but which isn't 100% government-owned - it would have community and business buy-in," he said.
The senator dismissed the government's framing that simply opening borders to foreign tech represents proactive policy. "That's not shaping destiny, that's surrendering to a foreign-controlled industry," he said. "The really hard stuff is what does it mean for our sovereign control of our culture, our government, our economy? There's no shaping happening in that regard."
Extinction risk warnings and regulatory guardrails
On warnings from AI insiders - including a senior Anthropic employee who claimed a greater than 10% chance AI could "kill all humans" within a decade - Shoebridge was blunt: "When well-informed insiders are telling us that uncontrolled AI development could lead to our species' extinction, politicians should listen."
He said Australia should model a world-class regulatory scheme and push for international cooperation on guardrails, even if the U.S. remains hostile to constraints. "If there is a rogue nation out there that is unwilling to put any constraints on frontier AI technology, even when there's an extinction risk attached to it, there is an obligation on the rest of the world, as best as possible, to cooperate to build some of the safety mechanisms and protections."
The case for a dedicated AI minister
Shoebridge criticised the current arrangement that spreads AI regulation across at least seven ministers and agencies. He rejected the Prime Minister's alternative of establishing a direct-access portal for industry to his office.
"A minister would have a staff, a minister would have a departmental structure. A minister would have a focused obligation to look at AI," he said. "The prime minister is a busy job, and the Prime Minister's Department is already doing Prime Minister's Department work. To just tack on AI as an afterthought is not actually the kind of leadership or consideration needed to confront what is a pretty monumental task."
Data centers and environmental concerns
The Greens want a one-year moratorium on new data centers while binding requirements on energy and water are established. Shoebridge said forcing 100% renewables and closed-loop water systems "just requires a bit of backbone on the part of the government."
But he said the larger unexamined issue is sovereign risk. "If AI ends up becoming intrinsic to how our financial system operates, how our health system operates, how our government operates, how people's workplaces operate, then how can we in good conscience hand the keys of that to a single country and a handful of quite hostile U.S. tech giants? That would be an extraordinary betrayal of the public interest."
Labor market disruption and the "vampire industry"
Shoebridge said AI's impact on jobs has reached kitchen-table conversations but not federal politics. He described unregulated AI as a "vampire industry" that concentrates wealth and power without delivering social good.
"If a tiny, already increasingly obscenely wealthy part of the world is going to get even more power, more control and more money - well, we need to bring them to heel," he said. "We need to share the wealth around, get some kind of public control over that project."
He pointed to communities questioning hyperscale data centers: "They're saying: 'Well, why? What's in it for us? It's going to drive up our power prices, potentially tap into our limited water supply. Our data will be mined. The profits will be mined. They'll eat up our jobs.'"
Why this matters for government professionals
Shoebridge's critique lands directly on public servants and the culture of the Australian Public Service. He described "an arrogance in the federal public service, this air of superiority and being above scrutiny by mere politicians" that he found "breathtaking" after moving from state politics. He said the government's message to bureaucrats is: "Give them less, hide what you can. If you can't hide it, bury it in some endless word salad."
For public servants navigating AI policy, procurement, and regulation, the interview signals that parliamentary scrutiny on sovereign capability, environmental standards for data centers, and the transparency of government-industry dealings will intensify. The call for a standalone AI minister also suggests structural reform of oversight arrangements may gain political traction - and with it, new compliance and reporting obligations for agencies already managing fragmented responsibilities across multiple portfolios.
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