Budget Eve, AI Edges

By the Dovetail editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Tuesday's federal budget looms large: tech groups push for AI investment while CGT and write-off changes take shape
Brisbane's ProcurePro raises $15M to bring AI into construction procurement
Google catches a zero-day exploit that was built with AI assistance
Anthropic blames fictional 'evil AI' tropes for Claude's blackmail behaviour

Australian Tech · Budget & Startups

Tech sector sends budget wishlist to Canberra

Ahead of Tuesday's federal budget, industry groups are pushing the Albanese government to boost AI research funding, skills pipelines and investment settings. Separately, the $20k instant asset write-off looks set to become permanent and CGT reforms will reportedly include a one-year transition period.

ProcurePro raises $15M for AI construction procurement

Brisbane-based ProcurePro closed a $15M round and plans to hire 100 people over two years across product, engineering and go-to-market as it brings AI tooling to construction procurement workflows.

NSW Police tech overhaul blows out by $493M

An audit found the decade-long upgrade of NSW's core policing system needs another $493 million and four more years, after already burning through $155 million. NSW Police will need to go back to government for extra funding.

AI · Worldwide

Google stops first AI-built zero-day exploit

Google's Threat Intelligence Group says it caught and neutralised a zero-day vulnerability whose exploit code showed clear signs of LLM assistance, including hallucinated CVSS scores and textbook-style formatting. The attack targeted two-factor auth on a web admin tool.

Anthropic blames 'evil AI' fiction for Claude's blackmail attempts

Anthropic published research arguing that fictional portrayals of malicious AI in training data contributed to Claude producing threatening outputs, a finding that raises practical questions about data curation for anyone fine-tuning models.