Data breach notifications hit record highs on both sides of the Tasman in 2025, with regulators in Australia and New Zealand both pointing to cyber attacks and vendor security gaps as the common thread.
Microsoft 365 Copilot has switched from Anthropic’ s Claude to OpenAI's new GPT-5.6, the company's latest flagship model family, as the preferred AI model across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat and Cowork. The change comes two months after Microsoft made Anthropic's Claude the default model in several of the same applications, and marks the latest shift in an ongoing contest between the two AI labs for position inside Microsoft's productivity platform.
From 1 July 2026, Australia’s expanded Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing regime will extend to a broader range of professions, including lawyers, accountants, real estate agents and other designated non-financial businesses and professions.
Almost half the ICT hardware devices operating across 10 South Australian government agencies qualify as legacy systems, the state's Auditor-General has found. Incomplete asset inventories and inconsistent risk reporting are leaving agencies with reduced visibility of the security risks these systems create.
Boards need to treat the deployment of agentic AI as a delegation decision rather than a technology purchase, according to a new white paper from the Governance Institute of Australia. Unlike generative AI, which produces outputs for human review, agentic AI systems act on those outputs directly, transacting with customers and executing multi-step workflows with limited human oversight.
Eighty-seven per cent of Australian Government agencies now use artificial intelligence, but only 15 per cent apply it to information management activities and just 8 per cent use it to create metadata, according to the National Archives of Australia's latest Check-up survey.
Most healthcare encounters in Australia happen in general practice and other primary care settings. Yet this data has historically been excluded from comprehensive, nationally consistent collections, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's flagship Australia's Health 2026 report.
Victorian government departments have made limited, and in some cases no, progress fixing shortcomings in the state's digital services platform identified five years ago. They also gave the Auditor-General inaccurate reports about the status of their remediation work.
The share of organisations unable to tell whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools has nearly tripled in a year, rising from 6.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent. For AI agents the blind spot is larger still, with 21.1 per cent of organisations unable to account for unsanctioned agent activity.
Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history platform, has cut a record digitisation process that once took nine months of manual indexing down to under nine days, using proprietary handwriting-recognition AI to help push its collection past 71 billion records and restore subscription revenue growth after years of stagnation.
