AI leaders want a slower pace car. Australia is still building the track.

If you’ve been forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up for free here. ESSENTIALS — Labor looks for border control in the wrong numbers — Albanese turns Hanson’s housing attack into a fight over nastiness — Australia’s AI plan has a 30-data center loophole — David Shoebridge interview DRIVING THE DAY ARE WE FINALLY GETTING MIGRATION POLICY REFORM? Maybe it’s sixth time lucky at Cabinet for Immigration Minister Tony Burke. Political challenge: The government needs to be in control of its borders, and to look like it’s in control. Governments who can’t do that lose elections. Yet creating that impression won’t lead to Labor outranking One Nation among voters when it comes to who they think is best equipped to handle immigration. These reforms are instead a play to stop the bleeding. Reality checks: — Fiddling with NOM numbers won’t demonstrate border control, in part because they’re nearly impossible to predict. — The Labor figure who comes across strongest on migration is SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, who advocates for a maximalist migration program. But that’s a non-starter for federal Cabinet. — If Australia’s professions were run less like quasi-cartels, then the qualification and accreditation process for skilled migrants to practice their professions would be a lot simpler, and would generate more tax income sooner. — Labor has both left and right flanks to manage. Seeing around corners: Home Affairs is seeking to please its political masters without having plans to mop up the knock-on effects of whatever clampdown on migration is chosen by Burke and Cabinet. Those side effects could be South Australia’s talent pipeline drying up because its international student numbers get cut, or infuriating India as a strategic partner, or aged care homes or farms not being able to function to necessary levels. One bright spot: The new team of data scientists at Home Affairs is getting positive reviews from the experts dealing with them for their efforts to measure which categories of migrants deliver the broadest economic benefits. Look out for immigration experts such as Martin Parkinson (who proposed reforms to points testing of visa applicants) to be wheeled out in a new capacity, perhaps as a skills ombudsman, helping the government better target its visa invites. MOVE FAST AND PAUSE THINGS — THE AI FRONTIER WANTS A PACE CAR Are they the bros who cried wolf? Or the geniuses with an essential warning? Anthropic wants to slow the race to super intelligence, per a new essay from founder and CEO Dario Amodei. We now have the two leading model makers and the world’s richest person, also a model maker, arguing we need to slow down. “Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless,” Amodei said. Canadian scientist and Turing Award-winner Yoshua Bengio has explained the origin of the risks and how new models could be monitored and licensed. Assistant Technology Minister Andrew Charlton described multiple breaches from OpenAI’s rogue AI agents as “unquestionably dangerous” after being briefed by Buck Shlegeris, CEO of U.S. AI safety group Redwood Research. Read Charlton’s comments. Yes, but: It’s easy to tell the world it needs to slow down while you personally keep racing ahead and amassing massive capital to ensure you stay ahead. Calls for a six-month pause on development went nowhere in 2023 because they lacked credibility. What role can governments play in AI safety? What’s next: If the world’s leading AI company wants a “middle way,” that’s an interesting mirror to the Albanese government’s approach, though Australia’s approach is limited to a lower part of the AI food chain: data centers. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is holding its Sydney Dialogue intelligence masterclass in Canberra all day today. Ryan is interviewing Anthropic’s international special envoy, former U.S. Ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich, live