Foreign AI is unavoidable. Australia’s challenge is in application

The article reframes Australia's AI strategy away from the costly and possibly unattainable goal of frontier model sovereignty toward 'AI readiness'—developing the workforce skills, regulatory expertise, and integration capability to adopt and govern foreign AI systems effectively. This pragmatic approach strengthens Pillar 3 (Industrial Base) and Pillar 5 (Decoupling) by emphasizing operational resilience and expert capability over autarky, reducing vulnerability to supply-chain disruption of frontier models while maintaining strategic autonomy in deployment and governance.