AI Copyright Australia: What CommBank’s Licence Means

AI copyright in Australia has moved from courtroom theory to everyday workplace policy. Last week Commonwealth Bank became the first major Australian bank to sign a Copyright Agency licence that lets its staff put eligible Australian news content into prompts for workplace AI tools. Today, the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence opens hearings in Sydney with copyright on the agenda, while the federal government is still weighing how AI companies might train on Australian content. For any business whose staff paste articles, reports or book extracts into ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, this is the week to check your settings.

Here is what changed, what is still unresolved, and the practical steps that keep your AI use on the right side of the line.

What CommBank’s AI copyright licence covers

On 2 October, CommBank announced it had signed a Copyright Agency Business Licence with generative AI permissions. The deal extends the Annual Business Licence that already covers everyday workplace copying and sharing of news articles, research papers and book extracts. Under the new permissions, staff can include eligible Australian newspaper text and other covered content in prompts, for example to summarise an article or help draft a presentation. Licence fees flow back to creators and publishers, including local news media.

Just as important is what the licence does not allow: licensed content cannot be used to train, create or improve an AI model.

The bank pointed to research Fiftyfive5 conducted for Copyright Agency in 2025, which found 64% of surveyed white-collar employees had used generative AI for work, and 47% of those users included third-party material such as published text and images in prompts at least weekly. In other words, copyrighted content is already flowing into AI tools in most offices, whether or not anyone has a policy for it.

The fine print businesses should know

Copyright Agency’s published terms for the AI extension are narrower than a quick headline suggests. The conditions include:

• copying and sharing stays within the licensed business, and the business must take steps so material is not captured outside the workplace, for example by an externally provided AI tool;
• limits such as one chapter or 10% of a book, or one article from a journal issue;
• the licence cannot replace buying an available subscription or product;
• it does not cover material containing Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property.

It also excludes training large language models, text and data mining, creating products for sale, and compiling datasets from inputs or outputs for training, fine-tuning, augmenting or validating AI tools. That last point matters if you are planning to load third-party articles into an internal knowledge base, so get the terms checked before you build.

Why copyright is on the table at today’s AI inquiry

The Joint Select Committee on AI is holding four days of hearings this week. According to Guardian Australia, Tuesday’s session includes copyright and artists’ groups and the ABC, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. The ABC’s submission warned of a “cannibalisation” of journalism and asked that AI companies face the same copyright, defamation and privacy rules as news outlets. Anthropic’s submission suggested an opt-out model, where rights holders could ask for their content not to be scraped; SBS argued such opt-outs are routinely ignored or bypassed. Copyright Agency has urged the government not to water down copyright settings.

In the background, the Attorney-General’s Department has been consulting on reform. The ABC reported in September on confidential slides titled “AI on Australian Terms” that set out two options. Both would let copyright owners opt out of AI training, and both would give AI companies legal permission to train on online material that has not been protected, subject to conditions such as payments to a central body or a minimum number of licensing deals. The government says it is still consulting and has repeatedly said it does not plan to weaken copyright protections. Nothing has been legislated.

What this means for Australian businesses

Most organisations are not training foundation models, so the training debate can feel remote. But two everyday questions are live right now: what content can staff put into AI tools, and where does that content go once they do. The CommBank deal shows a large, regulated organisation treating both as governance issues, not just IT settings.

A sensible approach for most businesses:

1. Write a short AI content policy. Spell out what staff may paste into prompts: your own documents, licensed news and research, public material, and what is off limits, such as client confidential data or paywalled content you do not have rights to use this way.
2. Check whether your AI tools retain or train on inputs. The licence condition about content not being “captured outside the business” is a good test for any tool. Enterprise plans, API deployments with retention controls and privately hosted models give you more control. Our guide to private LLM options in Australia compares the main patterns.
3. Treat knowledge bases differently from prompts. Loading content into a retrieval system is closer to building a dataset than pasting one article into a chat. Build your RAG knowledge assistant on content you own or have clearly licensed, and keep source records so every answer can be traced. If you are new to the concept, start with what RAG is and how it works.
4. Keep the integration layer in your hands. Routing staff AI use through your own ChatGPT and LLM integration lets you set retention, logging and model choice centrally, and change them if the rules change.
5. Train people, not just systems. Most copyright risk comes from well-meaning staff. Short, role-specific AI training for teams does more than a policy no one reads.

This is general information, not legal advice. If your use of third-party content is central to a product or service, talk to a copyright lawyer and to the relevant licensing body.

What to watch next

Watch this week’s Joint Select Committee hearings for how members respond to the opt-out proposals, and for any signal from the Attorney-General on which reform option the government prefers. Also expect more organisations to follow CommBank in licensing content for workplace AI use rather than leaving it to individual judgement.