“Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework,” Albanese said on Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue.

The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan.

The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an “Office of AI” directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation.

The “Australian Standards for AI” will include a “legal obligation” for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said.

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Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train AI systems.

“Anything less is theft,” he said. “No country has got this right yet.”

Industry representatives responded cautiously, expressing support for standards while warning against overregulation.

“We can’t go too far. We can’t be too prescriptive, because we are in a race and we are in a competitive contest in that regard,” Bran Black, CEO of the Business Council of Australia, told reporters. He said he did not agree with imposing mandatory obligations and warned that being out of step with other jurisdictions could mean Australia loses out on the immense investment being poured into the industry.

In the United States, backlash against data centres has prompted dozens of proposed moratoriums at the state and federal level, with New York this week becoming the first state to halt the construction of the largest data centres for a year. The European Union has rolled out an “AI Act” mandating transparency, copyright and public safety measures in the industry, under which regulators are set to begin imposing penalties beginning in August.

Here is how tech companies responded to Australia’s announcement:

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems, which the companies have denied.)

Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said Albanese was saying all the right things to assuage public concerns about the industry, but that many of the specifics of the regulations still needed to be worked out.

“The prime minister was clearly on top of the issues that are troubling the Australian public, and troubling the publics around the world,” he said. “The devil will be in the details exactly what they do.”

For Australia to capitalise fully on AI, it will need to go beyond attracting data centre investments to building its own homegrown companies, models and workforce, Walsh said.

Albanese likened the efforts to set standards for the industry to his government’s world-first social media law banning the use of the services for children younger than 16, saying it was important to get ahead of the technological shifts profoundly altering societies and economies.

“Imagine if the world had acted a decade ago. Imagine the difference it would have made if these limits had been put in place when the world first grasped the risks of these platforms,” he said of the social media law.

He added: “That is the opportunity, and the choice, we have now with artificial intelligence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Victoria Kim and Laura Chung

Photographs by: Getty Images, Adam Ferguson

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