How Labor's rushed defence bill could put OpenAI staff with guns in Canberra's data centres

Detailed summary

Marles puts new military target on Canberra's back.

Canberra neighbourhoods with data centres could be turned into fortified militarised zones patrolled by armed OpenAI employees and marked as legitimate wartime targets under sweeping new national security laws.

Data centres and the giant artificial intelligence companies that occupy them will fall captive to a defence bill expected to be rammed through Parliament by the Albanese government this week, which could also be exploited to stomp out community protests against the construction of future data centres.

The ACT is home to almost 30 data centres, which a digital human rights expert has warned could become defence zones at the whim of Defence Minister Richard Marles under the auspices of the Defence Legislation Amendment (Accelerating Capability and Protecting Bases) Bill 2026.

Employees of corporate contractors operating out of these zones can also be named defence officials with the same authority as Australian military personnel and the right to ignore the ACT's laws, including the criminal code.

The bill's "very broad definitions" gave Mr Marles discretionary power to hand out "permission slips for defence officials to break laws," warned not-for-profit Digital Rights Watch's head of policy Tom Sulston.

"If the minister says you're a defence official, well, congratulations, you're a defence official. And if they say this is now a military installation, congratulations, it's a military installation," he said.

Mr Marles can also authorise private-sector workers at defence zones to carry unspecified "equipment" under the laws.

"Equipment could mean anything from a gun through to an AI model," said Mr Sulston. "A defence official might have a gun."

AI hyperscalers like Anthropic and OpenAI had both begun to blur the lines between the defence and military uses of their large language models, said Mr Sulston, putting their employees in line to be named defence officials under the bill.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Canberra Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.