Strategic silences in the National AI Plan align with areas of low national agency.

Not all omissions from the plan should be viewed as gaps. For many capabilities the assessment’s recommended action is ‘maintain and monitor’. Many of the areas receiving limited attention in the plan fall into this category. They are capabilities where Australia currently has low maturity and low agency, or where government intervention is less necessary. This includes:

• accelerator manufacturing
• frontier model development
• most forms of private-sector AI capability.

The government has reasonably adopted a targeted approach in the plan, focusing public investment on what the government has assessed to be foundational capabilities while allowing the private sector to lead where appropriate.

There is untapped potential in Australia’s highest agency capabilities.

While the plan establishes strong foundations, it does not fully capitalise on all of Australia’s areas of highest agency – the capabilities in which Australia has competitive advantage. The assessment identifies opportunities to better leverage Australia’s strengths in critical minerals, strategic data assets and model development in computer vision. These are areas where Australia already possesses very high agency and which could be used more deliberately to strengthen national capability, address weaknesses and close critical gaps elsewhere in the AI ecosystem, while increasing Australia’s international leverage.

Australia’s highest areas of agency

The assessment found Australia has 8 capabilities that fall within the highest band: very high agency. This includes:

• our rich endowment in strategic and critical minerals
• 5 domain-specific datasets (medical, geospatial, environment and resources, demographic and infrastructure)
• our expertise in developing computer vision models
• our proven impact in international engagement (influence and norm shaping).

Every significant commitment in the National AI Plan aligns with the assessment’s recommendations.

Governments have finite resources and must make tough decisions about what to prioritise. It is noteworthy that the plan is strongly aligned with the assessment’s findings on where Australia should leverage, build or maintain agency. The plan’s major commitments focus on areas where Australia already possesses meaningful maturity and agency. This includes:

• data centres and supporting infrastructure
• public cloud
• general AI applications
• government and small to medium enterprise (SME) adoption
• international engagement.

Leaning into these capabilities harnesses existing strengths while also offering enabling benefits across the whole ecosystem.

The assessment found only 2 capabilities in which Australia has the lowest level of agency: manufacturing and packaging of accelerators (AI chips).

There are critical gaps to close

The assessment also identifies several globally scarce capabilities that are important to the public interest but remain underdeveloped in Australia – these capabilities should be the focus of the next wave of government prioritisation. This includes:

• public sector and public interest compute infrastructure
• key data lifecycle management capabilities (such as copyright, sourcing, validation and annotation)
• culturally and nationally inclusive models
• discerning, inclusive, and trusted AI adoption
• general AI literacy
• several specialised AI skills
• regulatory and oversight capability.

Addressing these gaps would strengthen Australia’s ability to support innovation, research, public services and national resilience, while ensuring AI systems reflect Australian values, cultures and identities and, perhaps most importantly, ensure that the benefits of AI are widely distributed.