Australia’s new nightmare: when AI makes foreign interference “quicker, easier, nastier”
A senior Australian security official has issued one of the starkest warnings yet about the collision of artificial intelligence and statecraft. Ciara Spencer, the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator, told a parliamentary committee this week that AI is fundamentally changing the threat landscape. The warning is blunt: AI makes influence operations faster, cheaper, and far more convincing. And right now, the Australian government cannot match the tracking tools that AI companies already use to follow false state-backed communications.
What the officials actually said
Spencer, who leads the Department of Home Affairs’ counter-foreign-interference work, used unusually direct language. “AI’s quicker, easier, nastier,” she told the committee. She explained that AI-generated content is “much more realistic and so the language is better.” On targeted interference, she said adversaries now scrape parliamentary speeches, social media profiles, and everything else they can find to craft messages specifically designed to hook an individual.
“If you’re looking at targeted foreign interference, they scroll all your parliamentary speeches, your social media profiles, everything about you so they can find a really targeted way to engage with you and make it more likely that you will engage back,” Spencer said.
Separately, officials noted that AI makes it “easier, faster, cheaper” for malicious actors to attack Australia’s critical systems. Fergus Hanson, the newly appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Office of AI, added a jurisdictional argument: if AI training firms are physically located in Australia, law enforcement can collaborate with them in ways that are not possible when the companies operate from overseas. “If there is a threat to Australians’ lives, through misuse of those platforms … This just invites a different level of collaboration that you can have, that is not possible if you don’t have the companies necessarily located in your jurisdiction,” Hanson said.
The case for the prosecution
There is already hard evidence that Spencer’s warning is well-founded. On 8 September 2026, the ABC published research from Reset Tech documenting a foreign network of more than 200 Facebook pages churning out AI deepfakes of Australian politicians. The pages impersonated the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and dozens of other figures. About one in 10 had been monetised through Facebook’s own creator payments, meaning the owner profits directly from a commercially motivated influence campaign.
The targets included Senator Fatima Payman, deepfaked saying “Please don’t deport me back to Afghanistan. It’s not safe for me there.” Another page showed Senator David Pocock apparently “joining forces” with One Nation. Neither video carried any AI label. Only one in three posts received labelling. Only one in 33 was deleted by the platform.
Rys Farthing, Reset Tech’s chief research officer, put it sharply: “We have a handful of researchers, and we were able to find this and detect all of these networks with ease. If we can do it, I don’t quite understand how these companies that have billion-dollar revenues can’t do it.”
The same Sri Lanka-based network was also targeting France, Italy, the UK, the US, Canada, and Mexico, using the same playbook. Globally, it operated 1,864 coordinated pages with a combined 5.9 million followers. This is not theoretical. It is happening now, at industrial scale, and the platforms are not stopping it.
The case for the defence
The officials’ framing is compelling, but it deserves scrutiny on several fronts.
First, the Reset Tech research reveals that the most active network targeting Australian politicians is commercially motivated, not state-directed. The pages made money from Facebook’s engagement algorithms. “This isn’t foreign interference as we traditionally think of it,” Farthing said. That distinction matters. Australia’s counter-foreign-interference laws and agencies are designed to counter state actors. When the threat is a Sri Lankan influencer business chasing ad revenue, the legal and operational toolkit may not fit neatly.
Second, the argument that AI companies’ physical presence in Australia is a precondition for law enforcement cooperation is asserted rather than demonstrated. Australia already has mutual legal assistance treaties, Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and established relationships with major AI firms through the Australian AI Safety Institute, which is already testing frontier models in partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate. Physical presence may help, but it is not clear it is the decisive factor Spencer and Hanson imply.
Third, the hacking claim, while consistent with global threat trends, lacks Australian-specific metrics in the testimony. AI does lower the skill floor for spear-phishing and vulnerability scanning, but sophisticated attacks on critical infrastructure still require significant resources and access. The threat is real, but the officials did not quantify how much AI has actually changed the success rate of attacks on Australian systems.
The missing middle
What neither side of the debate has adequately addressed is the governance gap. Australia currently has no AI-specific legislation. The Privacy Act 1988, Australian Consumer Law, and anti-discrimination laws all apply to AI systems, but none were designed for this threat landscape. The National AI Plan released in December 2025 relied on existing laws and voluntary guidance. Prime Minister Albanese’s July 2026 announcement of Australian Standards for AI and the new Office of AI within PM&C is the most significant policy shift yet, but the standards are not legislated. The consultation paper released on 17 September 2026 is open for public comment. Legislation is planned for early 2027.
That timeline leaves a gap of at least eighteen months during which the threat Reset Tech documented is operating at full scale with minimal regulatory constraint. The platforms’ own enforcement remains weak. And the officials’ warning about tracking tools is essentially an acknowledgement that the government is behind the curve, not just on technology but on the legal and operational frameworks needed to detect and respond to AI-enabled interference.
The question is not whether the threat is real. It is whether Australia’s response, including the argument for attracting AI training firms onshore, is proportionate and evidence-based, or whether it is a jurisdictional solution looking for a problem.
What this means for practitioners
If you work in government, critical infrastructure, or any role where you handle sensitive information, the implications are immediate. Assume your public communications, social media profiles, and parliamentary appearances are being scraped for targeting material. The deepfake playbook documented by Reset Tech relies on the gap between seeing and believing. When a politician appears to say something on video, viewers generally believe it is them. Verification habits need to become as routine as locking your workstation.
For security teams, the emphasis should shift from purely technical defences to monitoring for AI-generated content that targets your organisation or personnel. The same tools that can generate convincing fakes can also be trained to detect them, but only if someone chooses to invest in detection at scale.
“AI’s quicker, easier, nastier. And it enables it to be much more realistic and so the language is better.”
Ciara Spencer, National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator
The warning is clear. The tools exist. The gap is in the will to deploy them.
