TLDR
Commonwealth Bank is the first major Australian bank to pay for the legal right to use Australian news content in workplace AI prompts, with fees flowing back to publishers. Fiftyfive5 research found 47 per cent of white-collar workers who use generative AI include third-party published material in prompts at least weekly. The licence covers prompt use only; training AI models on the content is explicitly prohibited.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What CBA signed
Commonwealth Bank of Australia became the first major Australian bank to sign a Copyright Agency Business Licence that includes permissions for staff to use Australian newspaper text in workplace generative AI tools.[1] The GenAI permissions extend Copyright Agency's existing Annual Business Licence, which already covers everyday workplace copying and sharing of material such as news articles, research papers and book extracts, to include eligible Australian newspaper text in AI prompts. [1]
One limit is written into the agreement: licensed content cannot be used to train, create or improve AI models. Licence fees flow back to creators and publishers, including those in local news media, to support ongoing investment in Australian content.[1]
The announcement was made on 2 October 2026.
The scale of unlicensed use
Fiftyfive5, an independent market research agency, conducted research on behalf of Copyright Agency and found that 64 per cent of white-collar employees surveyed had used generative AI for work.[2] Of those users, 47 per cent included third-party material, published text and images, in AI prompts at least weekly. Put another way: in a team of ten, roughly five people already use generative AI at work, and two to three of them are pasting article text or image content into a prompt every week.
Josephine Johnston, chief executive of Copyright Agency: "Journalism and other published content have extraordinary value to businesses, whether staff are sharing an article with colleagues or using it in a prompt for an AI tool." [1] Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn framed it as a governance question: "Responsible AI adoption includes considering how we use content. This licence gives our people the right to use Australian news content so that they can maximise the benefit of generative AI tools to improve their work and better serve our customers." [1]
The policy moment around it
On 3 August 2026, the Albanese Government finalised the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) legislation, designed to reinforce the News Media Bargaining Code by encouraging digital platforms to strike commercial deals with eligible news publishers or pay a charge, with revenue distributed back to the sector. [3] Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence opens four days of hearings in Sydney this week, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and the ABC among the witnesses.
OpenAI apologised last week for its agents accessing four Australian government sites without authorisation in June 2026, a story covered in this publication's own reporting. That disclosure, the NBI legislation and Commonwealth Bank's licence together give the question of who pays for news content in AI workflows a harder edge than it had six months ago.
What it means for agencies and brands
For media buyers, agency strategy teams and marketing departments feeding article text into Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT or similar tools, Commonwealth Bank's decision changes the optics immediately. A major regulated institution has set a compliance standard in writing, with licence fees attached and a public announcement behind it. Teams doing the same thing without an equivalent licence are now the visible outlier.
The practical question is whether the Annual Business Licence or its GenAI extension covers the organisation. Copyright Agency operates a collective licensing model, meaning the agreement covers a broad catalogue of Australian published material rather than requiring individual publisher deals. The licence does not, in any version, permit that content to enter a model's training pipeline, so organisations already running fine-tuned or retrieval-augmented generation systems built on scraped news content face a separate and larger exposure than the prompt-use question Commonwealth Bank has now resolved.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What does the Copyright Agency GenAI licence actually allow?
How many employees are already putting third-party content into AI prompts?
Does every organisation need its own licence, or does the collective model cover everyone?
How does this relate to the News Bargaining Incentive legislation?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
