In a piece by The Age’s chief political reporter Paul Sakkal, published on 3 September, it was stated that after meeting with Deputy PM Richard Marles and junior tech minister Andrew Charlton, key players from Anthropic, Open AI, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were keen to make big investments in Australia. Furthermore, they were happy to locate datacentres in remote areas of Australia. According to the report, the meeting with tech executives, Marles and Charlton which took place in San Francisco, helped smooth the way for U.S. big tech investment in this country. (1)

 

The spin on this piece is clear. Australian government ministers and officials allegedly have leverage over U.S. big tech because of the public backlash against the data centre rollout in North America. So concerned are the big tech figures about the pushback from the U.S. public that they are willing to accommodate some small conditions on data centre and other AI related investments in various parts of the globe, in order to continue their hyper-scaling AI and AGI projects. Hence the reported agreements given to Marles and Charlton which; will locate datacentres in remote parts of Australia; will add renewables to the grid to help power the datacentres and; gives in-principle agreement to Labor’s AI standards. Such agreements open up the possibility for Anthropic to invest $21 billion in a Large Language Model (AI) training facility located somewhere in Australia.

 

A sticking point with Anthropic’s proposed investment is the vexed issue of allowing access to copyrighted material. The federal government has to allay concerned Australian citizens’ fears that the unhindered scraping of copyrighted Australian material by Anthropic will not go ahead, yet that is what Anthropic wants. A proposed way out of the conundrum is a compensation package for ‘creatives’, yet even this appears to be too much for Anthropic to contemplate. Bear in mind that the scraping of material from the internet, a process that has been going on for quite a while now, is the plundering of humanity’s patrimony for the primary benefit of private tech corporations. As others have said about the training of LLMs, it is akin to ‘the wholesale theft of intellectual property rights.’

 

The leverage spoken about in this article is largely delusional. Marles and Charlton met with figures from big tech in San Francisco, sometime in August. Prior to the trip Marles made it clear that the key driver for meeting with big tech representatives is to ensure that Australia does not miss out on the AI boom, which ‘is the biggest hinge point in Australia’s self-reliance since World War II as AI models become pivotal in running services such as telecommunications, banking and even national security.’ (2) The self-reliance that Marles spruiks is the exact opposite of what is actually happening; for self-reliance read becoming abjectly dependent on U.S. big tech. Marles is part of a cabal of Labor (and other) politicians that actively seek to make Australia a mere vassal of U.S. imperialist interests. 

 

 

As we have seen in Part 1 of this series, the U.S. ruling class is trying to maintain the United States’ hegemonic position by way of Pax Silica a part of which is what Edward Ongwese Jr calls the ‘Compute Axis’. (3) The ‘Compute Axis’ refers specifically to the oil rich Gulf states choosing to pivot away from oil and into a big tech future, making deals with Silicon Valley tech bros, while Trump and his family rake off some of the cream as deal enablers. Ongwese Jr argued that the ‘Compute Axis’ may have foundered on the rocks after Iran bombed Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE. Putting that to one side, Pax Silica is succinctly described by Ongwese Jr as ‘an American-led project that would secure control over supply chains for artificial intelligence and the chips to run it, at the same time creating a new dependency regime and tech stack that could be backed up with the threat of violence (economic or otherwise).’ (4)

 

It is important to note that the AI boom that Marles and others are so keen for Australia to be a part of has a strong geopolitical element associated with it. Marles is not unaware of this when in the same Age article he is reported as saying that it was critical for Australia to work closely with the U.S. in its battles for tech supremacy with China. Not for Australia to access the cheaper open source AI from China; that would be opening up Australia to Chinese intelligence gathering! (5)

 

Australian government ministers and officials appear to be falling over themselves to be part of the latest U.S. imperial project that is Pax Silica, which is spun as self-reliance and the meek conditions proposed by Albanese indicative of leverage. The tech bros are not renowned for their integrity nor their honesty and Australian ‘leaders’ have already shown their hand in their eagerness to not miss the AI boom. The U.S. tech oligarchy know that they have the upper hand in these negotiations and will agree to some not very onerous conditions in order to get what they want.

 

 

In a submission to the public inquiry into AUKUS, Adjunct Professor Warwick Powell detailed the issues arising from not having tech sovereignty: 

 

Modern national sovereignty is inextricably tied to technological sovereignty. A nation that does not control its digital infrastructure, cloud architecture, data pipelines and core algorithmic platforms operates at the discretion of those who do. American willingness to weaponise its dominance in information technology systems has been ably demonstrated by Farrell and Newman’s 2023 book Underground Empire.

 

Australia’s reliance on foreign proprietary "technology stacks" — specifically US-dominated cloud systems, enterprise software, and emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) models —creates deep operational dependencies: 

 

• Loss of Digital Autonomy: Key government services, critical infrastructure, and defence systems rely on proprietary architectures subject to foreign jurisdiction, regulatory shifts or export control regimes (such as ITAR and US cloud regulations).

• Complicity in Immoral and Unethical Warfare: The rapid deployment of automated foreign AI platforms in military intelligence and target selection directly links Australia to the operational ethics and legal violations of foreign technology developers —including documented strikes causing mass civilian casualties and deaths that directly breach international law.  (6)

 

Australia’s craven dependence on U.S. big tech not only surrenders our sovereignty but also allows for unprecedented levels of surveillance and data gathering by U.S. corporations. Palantir being the prime example. (7)

 

 

It comes as no surprise that Palantir has managed to insert itself into various federal government departments, Police forces and big Australian corporations. A quick glance reveals three government departments that have contracts with Palantir; the Department of Defence, AUSTRAC., and the NDIS.  AUSTRAC being the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre which acts as a regulator and financial intelligence unit. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) also has contracts with Palantir as does the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), and some state police and corrections systems. In the corporate field, Rio Tinto and Westpac have Palantir contracts. Coles also had a contact with Palantir but a concerted public campaign forced Coles to cut its ties with the tech giant. 

 

The public pushback against Palantir has gone global and for good reason; Palantir is an unapologetic supporter of U.S. imperialism and Israeli genocide. It is a company that mines data on an industrial scale and its software has been used in the killing of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians. There are no guarantees that it is not using data gathered from various entities that it has contracts with in Australia, with federal and state governments placing little or no constraints on Palantir. In fact, Palantir has used the good old revolving door to further its interests in this country with a former Labor MP Mike Kelly recruited by the company in April this year. (8)

 

 

According to Ben Eltham of Crikey, federal and state politicians have drunk the AI boom Kool Aid. That is, there has been the uncritical acceptance of the hyper-scaling and urgency narrative promoted by big tech oligarchs, by our elected representatives. Eltham argues that for federal and state politicians and high-level bureaucrats, the so-called AI boom with its attendant rapid roll out of datacentres is the latest version of the mining boom and it will boost the economy, increase productivity and enhance national security. Gripping Canberra and other capital cities is a techno-optimism helping create an environment that waives regulations and community consultation in order to ease the building of the AI infrastructure. (9)

 

The rush to build the datacentres has created resistance from concerned citizens worried about energy and water consumption, noise and air pollution associated with massive datacentres built in suburban areas. Hence the move by Marles, Charlton, Albanese and others to get U.S. big tech to agree to locate said centres in remote locations.

 

Underpinning the global datacentre build and the U.S. based AI project as a whole is a financial bubble, the size of which dwarfs the dot.com bubble and is possibly bigger than the sub-prime mortgage bubble, whose collapse led to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. No thought has been given to what happens with the datacentres when the bubble finally bursts. It is not even on our ‘leaders’ radar, so infused with techno-optimism are they. 

 

In conclusion, the above shows that Australian bourgeois politicians are only too happy to sell out Australian sovereignty to U.S. big tech and to continue our vassalage to U.S. imperialism. We need to bring about an independent and socialist country that puts peoples’ needs first.

 

 

(1) ‘AI tech giants pledge remote infrastructure’, The Age, 3 September, 2026, p.6. 

(2) ‘AI tech giants…’ The Age, p.6.

(3) For more on Pax Silica see the insightful contributed article here: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1789343340&catitem1=Fighting%20Imperialism%20around%20the%20world&catid1=15

For Part 1 of this series go here: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1786514106&catitem1=Fighting%20Imperialism%20around%20the%20world&catid1=15

(4) https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost 

For the official U.S. State Department website go here: https://www.state.gov/pax-silica/ 

(5) This is not to say that China would not or does not use technology to gather data either domestically or in other countries; it does. However, the anti-Chinese hysteria demonstrated in a recent 4 Corners ‘investigation’ regarding the possibility of hacking into a BYD Shark EV, which went to air on Monday 21 September, conveniently overlooks the massive elephant in the room that is U.S. surveillance and data gathering in this country.

(6) Submission to the AUKUS public inquiry, 13 August 2026, https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/#view-submissions p. 5.

(7) For more on Palantir see Part 2 of this series: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1788761502&catitem1=Independence%20From%20Imperialism,%20People%27s%20Rights%20&%20Liberties&catid1=14

(8) See here for Mike Kelly’s recruitment and his rationale for joining the company: https://www.palantir.com/kelly-explains-his-decision-to-join-palantir/

(9) https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/10/08/ai-policy-australia-artificial-intelligence-openai-anthropic-amodei-altman/