Verification institutions already exist in Canberra. The Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) regulates the government’s nuclear and chemical test ban obligations, and researches new verification techniques in collaboration with Australian universities, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. This does not mean that ASNO should verify AI treaties – rather, that the bureaucratic and political know-how is already in place and an AI equivalent does not need to be reinvented.
On the AI side, the institutions are younger and smaller, but growing. The AI Safety Institute (AISI) was announced (Opens in new window) in December 2025, with $29.9 million of funding over four years. It is an advisory body not supported by any AI-specific regulation, but it exists and is plugged into frontier labs and its international counterparts. A memorandum of understanding between the Australian government and Anthropic commits the company to joint safety evaluations with AISI, in conjunction with institutes in the US, UK and Japan. ASNO’s remit covers nuclear and chemical verification, while AISI has no explicit verification mandate. Nothing joins the two. That gap is where AI verification capability would sit.
The hardware is in Australia, too. Verification methods need testing under real operating conditions. Australia already hosts 160 data centres, with 90 more in development (Opens in new window). One concrete research avenue is power monitoring; early results (Opens in new window) suggest that patterns of electricity use can help distinguish AI training from other kinds of computation, a possible path for checking whether a data centre has run training banned by an agreement.
Running these experiments at scale in working facilities is a natural next step. New facilities also offer an opportunity to design verification in from the start. For example, the government could support voluntary pilots that install verification instrumentation and give researchers access.
Canberra should fund a dedicated AI verification research program, jointly scoped by ASNO and AISI, and open to universities, start-ups and data-centre operators. Novel verification techniques will not generate the political will for the US and China to forge an agreement to pace frontier AI. But credible, scalable methods of verification make it easier to come to such agreements. Building the techniques and the political momentum is a long-term task that Australia should start now.
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