The prime minister’s announcement focuses on “AI safety”, “AI security” and “frontier” AI models and companies. But Australians may remain unprotected from known AI harms that – though less spectacular – are already widespread and serious.

Nearly half of the recommendations are about increasing Australia’s preparedness for AI-related cyber incidents.

The recommendations make sense. The review is right to emphasise the role of building capacity, relationships, and cooperation. Effective and responsive AI regulation must go beyond the government simply issuing and enforcing rigid rules.

Despite these strengths, the government seems to be taking a narrow view of what “AI safety” means.

AI and algorithmic systems are increasingly integrated into important services such as healthcare, insurance, housing, finance, employment, education and social security.

We’ve seen Robodebt harm hundreds of thousands of Australians. Sexist AI-enabled job recruitment tools, AI-enabled stadium security systems that let a gun into the Melbourne Cricket Ground, racist policing algorithms, and AI meal-planners that recommend poisonous recipes are just a few among thousands of examples of everyday AI harms and risks.

As the Medicare incident showed, risks also emerge from interactions between software systems, organisations and real world contexts. It doesn’t make sense to just focus on powerful AI models out of context.

Seems pretty clear to me. Stuff like robodebt killed people are severely injured who knows how many. Nothing about systems like that, or say facial rec injuring privacy and falsy accusing people is being covered.

Instead it's about the stupid nerd rapture critihype stuff.

The average person is more likely to be hurt by automated resume sorting discarding theirs because of their name or variations in how they write due to racism encoded in the training data than some "rogue" chatbot pwning email.