Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has warned governments could have as little as six months to establish effective artificial intelligence frameworks before the world faces its first major AI-driven crisis.
Speaking at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Wednesday for Flinders University’s 2026 Jeff Bleich Centre Distinguished Lecture, Rudd said the speed at which frontier AI models were developing was creating an urgent challenge for governments around the world.
“There’s a real risk, at least according to Dario’s timetable, that we have a real-world crisis within the next six months without any effective national or international governmental frameworks to deal with it,” Rudd said, referring to recent warnings from Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei.
“The task, therefore, is urgent. Time is short. The time to act is now.”
The warning came as Rudd examined the global race to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems, particularly between the United States and China, and argued Australia needed both stronger safeguards and its own technological capabilities if it wanted a meaningful role in shaping what came next.
Rudd opened his address by turning his attention to South Australia, praising Premier Peter Malinauskas’ approach to AI and the State Government’s decision to establish a Royal Commission into the technology.
“There is no harder, more wicked problem than artificial intelligence, no harder, more wicked opportunity than artificial intelligence,” Rudd said.
“I commend the Premier’s leadership in embracing a Royal Commission and getting on with the business, because that’s the business of real political and policy leadership for the state.”
The South Australian Royal Commission into Artificial Intelligence is expected to begin on October 1, examining policy and regulatory settings as well as the technology’s impact on education, public services, skills, infrastructure and the state’s economy. A final report is due by July 2027.
Rudd argued governments were already confronting the consequences of increasingly capable AI systems while regulatory structures remained fragmented or, in some cases, largely absent.
Much of his address centred on the United States and China, which he described as the two countries capable of developing frontier AI models at the speed and scale likely to shape the technology’s global direction.
He said the US was pursuing a largely deregulatory approach aimed at maintaining its technological advantage, while China was aggressively pushing AI adoption throughout its economy as part of President Xi Jinping’s industrial strategy.
Yet Rudd argued both countries shared an interest in preventing the most dangerous uses of AI from spiralling beyond their control.
He pointed to risks including AI-enabled cybercrime, attacks on banking and payment systems, threats to critical civilian infrastructure, biosecurity incidents and autonomous AI agents acting without direct human instruction.
Rudd proposed an initial framework in which the US and China could agree on common definitions of AI risks, a shared system for determining their seriousness, information-sharing arrangements and crisis-management procedures.
A direct hotline between government and technical authorities could also form part of the framework.
“Whatever AI threats may be posed by Washington or Beijing against each other, I argue the most productive common ground now for any future AI guardrails is in fact about how AI threats by external third-party actors are a threat to both countries and to the world at large,” Rudd said.
He said one of the most pressing concerns was the speed of what is known as recursive self-improvement, where AI systems are increasingly used to help develop the next generation of more powerful AI.
Rudd cited Amodei’s recent warning that within six to 12 months, groups of autonomous AI agents could potentially become capable of operating together at a scale that could threaten major internet infrastructure.
Against that backdrop, Rudd argued governments needed systems capable of assessing frontier models before they were released, rather than trying to respond after something had gone wrong.
“In the absence of such a framework, there is a real risk that the world encounters its first genuine AI frontier model-generated catastrophic crisis or event with no intergovernmental mechanism for dealing with it,” he said.
For Australia, Rudd said participating in those global discussions required more than regulation alone.
He argued the country needed its own AI companies, expertise and technological infrastructure so Australian policymakers and researchers had the technical capability to contribute to international safeguards while protecting the country against emerging cyber threats.
Rudd said around US$35 billion in investment had already been secured for Australia’s emerging AI sector from four of the so-called “Mag Seven” technology companies, including through work undertaken by Australia’s embassy in Washington.
But he said considerably more would be needed.
“More must come if we are to develop the sovereign AI capabilities set in this country that we will need for the future,” Rudd said.
Earlier in the address, he warned Australia risked being left behind altogether if it failed to develop those capabilities.
“We were once called the lucky country. We have now become often the complacent country,” Rudd said.
“We need a new national mindset that drives us to actively carve out our economic and national security future in what is an increasingly dangerous and uncertain world.”
Rudd said AI had become one of three major global forces confronting Australia, alongside the rise of China and climate change, with implications stretching from economic productivity to defence and national security.
“If we in Australia miss the AI revolution by not building our own sovereign companies, capabilities and competencies, the brutal reality is that Australia will no longer be counted in the first rank of nations,” he said.
“The AI genie is out of the bottle. It can’t be put back. The question, the challenge and the urgent national task now facing us all is: how do we manage it?”
