The Week AI Rules Decided Who Answers for the Agent

An AI agent went looking for public data on Australian medical spending in June and walked into a government database it had no permission to open. Australia disclosed the breach on 23 September. The four answers that followed — in Canberra, Washington, Ottawa and Wuhan — all landed on the same party: not the machine, the people who set it going.

Canberra: buy the journalism first. Australia is already the country where an AI developer cannot train on Australian news without negotiating a licence with the rights-holder, and OpenAI and Anthropic have both been refused a way around that. 12 That refusal is now hardening into legislation: Australia is drafting AI-specific laws to begin in 2027, and is weighing a duty on AI companies to disclose a security breach within 72 hours — the clock other firms already run on. The Senate inquiry into AI and data centres has called OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to appear, with public hearings in Canberra from Thursday 1 October. 3

Washington: the instruction is what counts. The chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, said on 25 September that he would keep resisting the idea of agents as autonomous actors, and that the developers who instruct an agent are the ones liable for what it does — adding that the commission's authority over companies that conceal data breaches could reach AI developers too. 4 A day earlier the commission opened a public comment period on a rule that would hold online platforms responsible for fraudulent and misleading advertising.

Ottawa: the questions that closed. Canada's innovation department closed its consultation on AI transparency on 23 September. 5 Of the five areas it asked about, two bear directly on newsrooms: whether AI-generated content should have to be detectable and labelled, and whether the activity of AI agents should be traceable. A "what we heard" report follows; nothing is in force.

Wuhan: the machine's bill, added to the price. On 23 September the Jiang'an District People's Court in Wuhan announced the first ruling in Hubei province on copyright in an AI-assisted short drama. 6 The court held that the 47-episode drama was a protected audiovisual work — human scriptwriting, storyboard prompt design, selection of generated scenes and post-production all counted as individual creative contribution — and found a rival account that copied it in full and monetised it through ads liable for infringement. With no evidence of the copyright holder's loss, the infringer's gain, or a market licence fee, the court set statutory damages at RMB 20,000, and counted token-consumption computing costs and commercial AI tool licences among the production costs. The judgment is final; neither side appealed. The court's advice to creators: keep scripts, prompt drafts, generation records, project files and proof of first publication, because that record is what supports a claim that the output is yours.