ASIC's 2026 Plan: AI Accountability Is Now a Priority

ASIC oversees about 3.5 million Australian companies. On 26 August it told all of them, in effect, the same thing: reaching for AI does not hand your accountability to the software. The regulator's new Corporate Plan sets a blunt posture for the year ahead — "easier to deal with" for businesses trying to comply, and "harder to avoid" for those causing harm — and it names artificial intelligence as one of the things it will now watch.

The Corporate Plan 2026-27, published on 26 August, is ASIC's statement of where it will spend its attention. Chair Sarah Court put it plainly: "AI can improve services, productivity and decision making, but its use must not weaken accountability or consumer and investor protections." The specific AI focus is aimed at financial services — how banks deploy customer-facing AI, and the risk of AI-driven manipulation, deepfakes and misinformation distorting markets. The principle underneath it is not sector-specific.

The plan's other half is a genuine carrot. ASIC is promising to approve the bulk of routine licence applications faster, to cut the supervisory review notices it sends firms by 15 per cent, and to modernise the company registry every business already touches. The design is deliberate: comply, and the regulator gets out of your way; cut corners — including with AI — and it comes looking.

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If you run an accounting practice, a financial-advice business, a mortgage broking or credit firm, or an SMSF audit — anything ASIC touches — read the AI line as directed at you. It does not say don't use AI. It says you remain the accountable party for what the AI produces. A statement of advice drafted with a model, a client risk assessment scored by a tool, a compliance summary generated overnight: if it's wrong, "the AI did it" is not a defence ASIC will accept. We've written about finance leaders deploying AI agents they can't explain — ASIC has now made that gap an explicit supervisory concern.

The wider signal matters even if you're not ASIC-regulated. ASIC isn't acting alone. It sits alongside the ACCC, the OAIC and the Fair Work Commission in a sector-by-sector enforcement model Canberra confirmed this year — no single AI law, but every existing regulator applying its own rules to AI. Four regulators, one message: a human stays on the hook. If you're not sure how much of your firm's client-facing work already runs on unchecked AI, see where your exposure sits.

The practical response isn't to slow AI down. It's to make accountability visible. For any AI-assisted output that reaches a client, a regulator, or a decision that affects someone — advice, a valuation, an eligibility call, a compliance lodgement — keep a short record of who reviewed it, against what source, before it went out. Call it an AI accountability record if you like. ASIC's world runs on being able to show your reasoning after the fact, and a one-line note of human review is the difference between a defensible process and a bare "the tool told us so." Build the habit now, while adoption is still cheap to shape, rather than reconstructing it under a review notice.

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