Week of 3 November 2025
Good Ancestors' October/November 2025 newsletter covers a dense cluster of Australian and international AI policy developments.
Key points
- Key Australian threads include Treasury's light-touch ACL review, eSafety's new AI chatbot codes, and the pending National AI Plan.
- Australia's IMD digital competitiveness ranking fell from 15th to 23rd, with its AI laws ranking dropping from 8th to 34th in one year.
Week of 13 October 2025
MIT AI Risk Repository used LLMs to classify 950+ AI governance documents across risk, mitigation, and sector taxonomies.
Key points
- Governance failure, security vulnerabilities, and transparency were the most-covered risk domains; AI welfare and multi-agent risks were least covered.
- US-heavy dataset limits global generalisability; Australian documents are unlikely to be well-represented in current outputs.
AI Now Institute testified to Philadelphia City Council on AI policymaking, framing it as 'people vs. corporate power'.
Key points
- The testimony reflects a growing trend of civil society organisations shaping subnational AI governance in the US.
- Limited direct relevance to Australian federal agencies; useful as a signal of AI governance discourse only.
Week of 29 September 2025
NIST's CAISI evaluated three DeepSeek models against four US models across 19 benchmarks, finding significant US leads in performance and security.
Key points
- DeepSeek models were 12 times more susceptible to agent hijacking and responded to 94% of jailbreak attempts vs 8% for US models.
- Australian agencies using or considering DeepSeek models face security and CCP-narrative-propagation risks flagged by a peer-jurisdiction regulator.
Week of 22 September 2025
CAISI worked with OpenAI and Anthropic to identify security vulnerabilities and improve AI security measurement.
Key points
- Evaluations were completed in partnership with the UK AI Security Institute, signalling ongoing Five Eyes-adjacent AI safety cooperation.
- Australia's AISI is not mentioned; this bilateral US-UK arrangement may inform where Australia sits in frontier AI security collaboration.
Week of 8 September 2025
Good Ancestors' September 2025 newsletter covers major Australian and international AI governance developments across two months.
Key points
- Australian threads dominate: a national AI Act debate, six new AU-focused reports, GPT-5 oversight gaps, and calls for an Australian AISI.
- International threads include the US AI Action Plan, China's competing governance vision, EU GPAI Code of Practice, and UK AISI pre-release testing.
Week of 7 July 2025
Good Ancestors' July 2025 newsletter covers EU GPAI Code of Practice, Trump AI Action Plan, and OpenAI's Australian economic blueprint.
Key points
- OpenAI's Australia-specific blueprint and the OAIC privacy self-assessment tool are the most directly APS-relevant items.
- Also covers Switzerland's sovereign LLM, US state AI laws, and a brief roundup of international regulatory developments.
Week of 9 June 2025
Good Ancestors' June 2025 newsletter covers four lead items and a broad 'in case you missed it' roundup of AI policy developments.
Key points
- Australian-relevant items include the Albanese-AWS $20B data centre deal, the government's 'light-touch' regulatory posture, and AI workforce concerns.
- International items cover California's AI policy working group report, G7 AI-for-prosperity statement, and tech giants' superintelligence pivot.
Week of 2 June 2025
AI Now Institute's 2025 annual report frames AI as a power concentration problem, not a technology problem.
Key points
- Report argues AI harms are structural and calls for regulatory intervention, antitrust action, and community organising.
- Primarily a US-oriented advocacy document; APS relevance is indirect but useful for understanding critical-AI discourse.
Week of 5 May 2025
Good Ancestors' May 2025 newsletter covers three distinct developments: US AI safety rollbacks, OpenAI's Stargate global expansion, and Federal Court GenAI consultations.
Key points
- The Federal Court of Australia item is directly relevant to APS practitioners - submissions were open until 13 June 2025.
- US deregulation under Trump is framed as increasing pressure on Australia and other middle powers to fill the governance gap.
Week of 21 April 2025
AI Now Institute report argues industry-led AI safety frameworks are weakening established military and defence evaluation standards.
Key points
- Report draws parallels with Cold War-era nuclear governance frameworks, calling for democratic oversight of military AI deployment.
- Australian federal agencies are not the primary audience; relevance is indirect, through international AI safety governance discourse.
AI Now Institute report argues industry-led AI safety frameworks are weakening established military-grade safety standards in the US.
Key points
- Report draws on Cold War-era nuclear safety governance as a model for rigorous, context-specific AI evaluation in defence contexts.
- Primarily a US defence-sector critique; limited direct Australian regulatory parallel but relevant to APS AI safety governance thinking.
Week of 3 March 2025
Alan Turing Institute report calls for balancing academic freedom with research security in AI.
Key points
- State-sponsored threats to AI research are a growing concern for UK universities and research institutions.
- Limited direct applicability to APS; Australian universities and CSIRO/Data61 face analogous pressures.
MIT AI Risk Repository was presented at the inaugural IASEAI conference in Paris, February 2025.
Key points
- The Paris AI Action Summit convened researchers, industry, press, and policy representatives amid a fragmented global AI governance landscape.
- This is a conference recap with limited direct APS policy or operational content - context only.
Week of 30 December 2024
MIT AI Risk Repository adds 13 new frameworks in its December 2024 update, now covering over 1,000 AI risks from 56 sources.
Key points
- Newly added frameworks include NIST AI 600-1, China's AI Safety Governance Framework, and the UK Government Office for Science frontier AI report.
- Australian contributors are among the authoring jurisdictions; the repository commits to quarterly updates through 2025.
MIT AI Risk Repository has reached 90,000+ users since August 2024, used by governments and companies globally.
Key points
- A new AI Risk Index project launching Q1 2025 will evaluate how key actors respond to high-priority AI risks.
- Planned crosswalking of the repository's taxonomies against NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act is directly useful for APS risk practitioners.
Week of 23 December 2024
Annual AI year-in-review podcast covers model capabilities, economics, regulation, and geopolitics across 2024.
Key points
- Topics span frontier model economics, AGI timelines, DeepSeek, robotics, compute infrastructure, and industry consolidation.
- Audio-format roundup with no written analysis; low immediate actionability for APS readers despite broad coverage.
Week of 9 December 2024
Good Ancestors' December 2024 newsletter covers three distinct AI policy developments across Australia, Singapore, and Canada.
Key points
- Australia's Senate AI inquiry final report recommends dedicated whole-of-economy AI legislation with a risk-based approach.
- Singapore has enacted deepfake election content bans; Canada has announced a national AI Safety Institute with research partners.
Week of 21 October 2024
AI Now paper argues commercial foundation models integrated into military targeting systems pose underappreciated national security risks.
Key points
- Systems like Gospel and Lavender, deployed in Gaza, illustrate risks of personal data exfiltration and adversarial exploitation in military AI.
- Recommendations focus on insulating military AI from commercial foundation models - not a direct APS procurement or governance mandate.
Week of 14 October 2024
AI Now Institute publishes a multi-author critique of Europe's AI industrial policy, challenging competitiveness and sovereignty framings.
Key points
- Essays cover public procurement, cloud infrastructure, trade policy, and open AI as levers for public-interest outcomes.
- Limited direct APS operational relevance; useful as a critical-lens counterpoint to mainstream AI industrial policy thinking.
Week of 7 October 2024
Good Ancestors' October 2024 newsletter covers three distinct AI governance developments across Australia, the US, and the UN.
Key points
- Australia's voluntary AI safety standards and mandatory guardrails consultation paper are the primary Australian thread.
- California's SB 1047 veto and UN Advisory Board recommendations round out the international coverage.
Week of 30 September 2024
MIT AI Risk Repository summarises a UN-focused ethical AI framework identifying 13 AI risk categories.
Key points
- The framework covers risks relevant to APS governance work: bias, transparency, manipulation, and exclusion.
- The underlying paper is from 2021; this is a secondary summary with limited new analytical value for APS readers.
AI Now Institute testified against NYC's MyCity portal, citing corporate capture and citizen surveillance risks.
Key points
- The case illustrates risks when public AI infrastructure embeds vendor data advantages and opaque governance.
- Limited direct APS applicability, but the digital wallet and behavioural tracking scenario is a useful cautionary case study.
Week of 9 September 2024
A Gradient Substack mini-update covers an international AI safety treaty and a technical codec development.
Key points
- The international AI safety treaty angle may be relevant to Australian AI governance and AISI positioning.
- Extracted text is paywalled - substantive content is not accessible for analysis.
The Gradient's issue 83 covers AI music streaming fraud, a new LLM search algorithm, and several AI news briefs.
Key points
- A legally binding Council of Europe AI treaty signed by the US, EU, UK, and others is briefly noted — Australia is not mentioned.
- Mixed-topic tech newsletter; no single item is developed in depth — low priority for focused APS reading.