Nobody's Regulating AI for Boards Yet. That Doesn't Mean Nobody's Watching.

I spent a week reading regulator guidance and a Federal Court judgment instead of the AI headlines. Twenty-five years of turnaround work taught me to read the source before forming a view, because everyone downstream is working from someone else's summary.

Three separate bodies have said something about what they expect from a board on AI: the charity regulator, the directors' institute, and a Federal Court judge. None of them is a new law. All of them point the same way.

A judgment that was not about AI

ASIC v Bekier is not an AI case. It is a Federal Court judgment about Star Entertainment: its non-executive directors were found not to have breached their duties, while its former CEO and general counsel breached theirs by failing to make sure serious risks reached the board. But Justice Lee also addressed AI in the boardroom. Commentary on the judgment reports him saying that any use of AI should be controlled and transparent, and that boards should "discuss and deliberately govern any AI use by formal adoption of policies" (
). I have read this in law-firm summaries, not in the judgment itself, so check the judgment before quoting it.

What the directors' institute published

The Australian Institute of Company Directors and the UTS Human Technology Institute have published a second edition of A Director's Guide to AI Governance, with a separate board summary and checklist for small and medium organisations and not-for-profits. Their checklist asks boards to discuss how AI serves the organisation's strategy, to consider the organisation's risk appetite for AI, to name who is accountable for AI decisions, and to build board understanding and draft an AI policy. I could not open the full second edition, so I am not describing its internal structure.

What the charity regulator is saying

The ACNC's guide, Charities and artificial intelligence, treats AI as a decision that a charity's Responsible People should weigh carefully, within the duties they already carry. It does not tell charities to avoid AI or to rush into it. AI is not one of the ACNC's regulatory focus areas for 2026-27, which are reported to be governing documents and partnerships (
). But it sits inside the same theme: is a board's governance keeping pace with how the organisation now operates?

Why I built a check

I have spent my career doing the diagnosis before the strategy: SILC, Metro Assist, CareWays, a $100M governance program with the UN. The thing that hurts an organisation is rarely the thing everyone is already arguing about. It is the thing nobody has mapped, because nobody owns it.

So I built a free ten-minute check that asks the questions in the checklist above: where AI is used, who is accountable, whether there is a policy, and whether people understand it. No pitch waits at the end.

Take the AI Governance Check →

Updated 16 October 2026 after re-checking every source.