Atomic Artificial Intelligence: Why Australia Needs an AI Containment Strategy

Tritian Young-Glasson | Cyber, Tech and Space Fellow

Image sourced via Freepik.

Artificial Intelligence Technologies (AIT’s) present humanity with a technology containment challenge.

In May 2023, the architects of AITs conceded that ’mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’. Despite appeals to suspend AIT development, global strategic competition continues unabated. 

Australia has announced its AI Safety Institute. Its effectiveness will be tested as industry and government integrate AITs into core operating infrastructure systems at scale rapidly, handing over control to AIT systems with minimal to no safety provisions. Prolific AIT adoption outpacing containment regulations and protocol formulation, compromises national security and personal safety. Australia’s AI Safety Institute should therefore prioritise the pursuit of comprehensive and rapidly actionable containment efforts to keep Australia and Australians safe with the velocity of technological change. 

The Atomic Nature of AITs

Following the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, the international order was confronted with an unprecedented crisis: how to prevent a technology of unparalleled destructive capacity from destabilising the global balance of power. A resolution emerged through diplomatic efforts and international cooperation, culminating in the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which established clear principles for nuclear containment. The NPT demonstrates how proactive containment can prevent mutually assured destruction (MAD). Accordingly, Australia must learn from nuclear containment efforts if we are to address AITs’ emerging threat to national security and international stability. 

AITs represent our generation's atomic moment. AIT agents in particular, capable of autonomous proliferation without oversight, demand attention. While AITs and agents lack the immediate kinetic impact of nuclear weapons, they possess the capacity to orchestrate destruction through more subtle means. AIT systems can learn to deploy - and be granted access to - weapons of various forms, including manipulated human agents, conventional armaments, sensitive and poisoned data, and biological vectors, executing complex attacks without human oversight or warning systems that afford the opportunity for human intervention.

The democratisation of AITs represents a fundamental departure from nuclear precedent. Today, individuals with modest technical competence can develop and deploy AI models across interconnected systems. Moreover, autonomous AIT agents now demonstrate capacity for independent action, communication, and collaborative decision-making across networks without human supervision, proliferating through digital infrastructure with minimal resistance.

Australia’s Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability

Australia's critical infrastructure is vulnerable to AIT manipulation.The nation hosts 300+ data centres, each equipped with backup on-site power systems designed to ensure operational continuity during grid shortages, with centres dependent upon vast amounts of power. A compromised AIT system could generate and feed false shortage data across this network simultaneously, triggering centres to disconnect from the grid en masse, overwhelming national energy grid infrastructure capacities through uncoordinated surge effects.

To effectively mitigate such circumstances, Australia must act swiftly and comprehensively. Interconnected systems spanning the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 11 identified critical sectors require immediate containment protocols. Therefore, Australia needs frameworks governing AIT system access levels, mandatory oversight mechanisms, and rapid response capabilities for AIT-related incidents. 

A Domestic AIT Containment Strategy

AITs’ future containment, like that of atomic weapons, hinges upon domestic leadership and international cooperation.

Therefore, Australia should adopt a Domestic Artificial Intelligence Technologies Containment Strategy (DAITCS) that adapts the proven principles of the NPT to contemporary technological realities. DAITCS would ensure the strategic imperative for rapid AIT adoption to advance offensive capability is balanced against the corresponding vulnerabilities and defensive requirements such adoption generates. DAITCS should be proactive, establishing preventative measures and adaptive governance that influences and evolves in tandem with AIT deployment.

First and foremost, utilising existing authorities under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, the nation should establish comprehensive protocols governing AITs access to sensitive data, critical infrastructure systems, and autonomous capabilities.

In addition, AIT permissions must be precisely delineated with clear responsibilities across the 11 identified critical sectors, alongside unambiguous, mandatory and enforceable chains of human oversight, enhanced monitoring capabilities and intervention powers with clear lines of accountability. Specifically, Australia should prioritise establishing sophisticated monitoring capabilities for detecting unauthorised AIT agent activity in critical infrastructure systems, implement failsafe mechanisms for those systems, and develop specialised response teams trained in AIT threat prevention, mitigation and defensive intervention.

Furthermore, Australia should establish isolated testing environments preceding critical infrastructure deployment, continuous vulnerability assessment targeting AIT-specific weaknesses, redundant systems immune to simultaneous AIT compromise, and manual override capabilities at critical control points and decommissioning powers.

Finally, Australia should exercise leadership in forging international AIT containment agreements encompassing shared intelligence on malicious AIT and agent activity, coordinated response protocols, multiple lines of defence, capability sharing and coordination as well as restrictions on high-risk capability transfers, and verification regimes analogous to nuclear inspection frameworks for verifying and monitoring AIT activity globally.

A Path Forward

AITs power lies not in what it is but in what it can access and control. The window for containment is closing rapidly. Unlike nuclear weapons requiring significant resources, AI systems are increasingly democratised and deployable across borders. The time between AI development and misuse has shrunk from years to days.

AIT investment is essential for strategic advantage, yet participation in this technological competition simultaneously exposes domestic systems to unprecedented risk. The potential for cascading failures, whether through hostile action or human error, demands that defensive capabilities advance commensurately with offensive development.

The atomic age demonstrated that technologies yield to containment when nations recognise mutual vulnerability, acting in response strategically, decisively, and cooperatively. Australia has the opportunity to establish proactive containment measures while maintaining competitive advantage and lead global AIT containment efforts, but only if we act now, before technological proliferation renders containment impossible and causes systemic failures.

Tritian Young-Glasson is the Cyber, Tech and Space Fellow for Young Australians in International Affairs. Tritian has an Advanced Masters of Applied Cybernetics, and her research and projects span data centres, governance, satelites, AI ethics, health services, and developing a machine learning cyber-physical system to address food insecurity.

Tritian specialises in foresight, critical systems analysis, and technologies operating at the intersection of social and environmental systems. She is passionate about technology diplomacy and steering the technologies defining our futures toward outcomes that are safe, sustainable, and responsible.

Our 2025 Cyber, Tech and Space Fellow is sponsored by .au Domain Administration (auDA). For more information, visit their website here.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Young Australians in International Affairs. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.