As foreign tech companies race to dominate artificial intelligence, one Canberra couple is placing a bet that growing unease about reliance on US and Chinese-built models could create an opportunity for home-grown alternatives.
Michael and Rachel Gately co-founded Trellis Data, launching its sovereign AI platform Agentaus in early May 2026 to offer the public and private sectors a local alternative to foreign hyperscalers.
Chief executive Michael Gately was already developing AI solutions years before ChatGPT turned the technology into a global obsession.
"We were doing this in 2017, 2018, when you know it feels like AI's only just recently turned up, but it's been around for decades," Mr Gately said.
"We felt like we were sort of in front of the curve."
Beyond commercial opportunities, Mr Gately said sovereign capability was a national security imperative, pointing to the Anthropic's Fable model's global suspension at the request of the US government.
"When I look at the way AI has been used geopolitically, it's often been used as a weapon," Mr Gately said.
"Australia needs to be able to stand on two feet if, in the future, there is a similar kind of outage or closing of AI for other countries."
That concern was shared across the federal government, though senior officials differed on how Australia should compete.
Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) chief executive Chris Fechner said Australia should not try to match foreign tech companies dollar-for-dollar, saying there was no value in replicating trillion-dollar investments like Claude or GPT.
Instead, Mr Fechner pointed to the potential of targeted internal agents and urged agencies to adapt high-performing open-weighted models like Meta's Llama domestically, rather than relying exclusively on proprietary foreign software that risked being withdrawn or banned.
CSIRO chief executive Doug Hilton echoed that stance during his National Press Club address. Mr Hilton said Australia had to chart a course that built capability using "Australian data for Australian benefit" and advocated for developing specialised domestic applications.
However, Mr Fechner acknowledged that complete decoupling remained unrealistic. He said foreign hyperscalers like IBM, Microsoft, AWS and SAP directly employed more than 10,000 people in Australia and supported 3500 local businesses.
Although Mr Gately welcomed the focus on specialised systems, he pushed back on the idea that Australia should stay out of the frontier race altogether.
"Niche models have their place. There's no doubt about that," he said. "But I don't completely agree that we shouldn't be building frontier models here. I actually think we should."
He said foreign governments across the Indo-Pacific were already reaching out to support Australian capability.
"There are countries very keen ... to incentivise and support Australian AI capability because it's not US-based and it's not Chinese-based, it's relatively independent," Mr Gately said.
To make adoption simple for government agencies, Trellis had built Agentaus to meet tough local security rules and protect budgets from unexpected price spikes.
"All our services are located in data centres in Australia where the Australian federal government payload is generally located," Mr Gately said. "We're not training on people's data, we're not monetising their data, so their data's safe with us."
Mr Fechner said the DTA partnered with Home Affairs and the Signals Directorate to build proper data controls and locality into contract terms, ensuring agencies could use AI safely without sending sensitive work offshore.
Beyond baseline security, Mr Fechner said federal procurement needed to support domestic innovators alongside global vendors.
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"How do we actually take advantage of some of those, and how do we make sure that the Commonwealth's investment in buying digital is actually also building up our digital ecosystem for Australia, including the opportunity to export those capabilities?" he said.
Behind the high-stakes technology was a distinctly Canberra story. Chief of staff Rachel Gately, drawing on a background in finance and small business, built the company's foundational engineering core by recruiting its initial cohort of AI specialists.
For Mrs Gately, the public response since launching Agentaus confirmed that Australians were hungry for local tech independence.
"Everybody's just celebrating the fact that Australia has this capability," Mrs Gately said. "People want Australia to stand on its own two feet and don't want it to depend on US tech alone."
Navigating federal procurement remained an uphill battle for domestic startups competing against established foreign tech companies.
However, Mr and Mrs Gately remained committed to proving that Australia's sovereign technology strategy could be driven directly from the capital.
"It's a story of a Canberra company that wants to make a national difference," Mr Gately said. "And if people got behind Canberra companies trying to do national things more, I think it would be great for the city."
