About
Johanna Weaver is Co-Founder and Executive Director of TPDi. She is a reformed commercial litigator, a recovering diplomat, and an escaped professor. Johanna concluded her term as Australia’s independent expert and chief cyber negotiator at the United Nations in 2021. In 2022, she was appointed Professor in the Practice of Cyber and Tech Policy at ANU. She has served to numerous boards, including the ICRC Global Advisory Board on Protecting Civilians from Digital Threats, the Minister for Government Services’ Independent Advisory Board, and the Data Standards Advisory Committee.
Speaking at AI Safety Forum 2026
Who Determines What Safe Is? Gender, Diversity and Power in the Future of AI
AI safety is often framed as a technical challenge, but every approach to AI safety begins with human decisions: what counts as harm, whose harms matter, and who gets to answer those questions? This panel will explore how gender, diversity and lived experience shape the way AI risks are identified, prioritised and governed. Bringing together expertise from software engineering, public policy and gender equality, the discussion will examine how AI can reproduce existing inequalities, why diverse perspectives strengthen AI safety, and what more inclusive governance could mean for the future of trustworthy AI.
A Scientist, A Believer, a Sceptic and a Diplomat: What Should AI Safety Prioritise Now?
This panel is designed to unpack different perspectives on AI Safety priorities. For some, the greatest risks are immediate: bias, misinformation, labour disruption, surveillance, concentration of power, and threats to democracy and human rights. For others, the greatest danger lies ahead: increasingly capable frontier AI systems that may eventually exceed human capabilities and create catastrophic—or even existential—risks. Governments and decision makers cannot afford to focus exclusively on either. They must make decisions today under conditions of uncertainty, balancing immediate harms with longer-term risks, while recognising that resources, political attention and regulatory capacity are finite. Rather than asking who is right, this session will explore why reasonable people arrive at different conclusions, where genuine consensus exists, where disagreement remains, and what that means for Australia's approach to AI safety.
Assessing AI Sovereignty, Agency & Dependence
This workshop will present the AI Agency Assessment Tool - a world-first methodology to assess national AI capability. AI Sovereignty is often framed as binary. A country either has it or not. But for complex global AI supply chains this binary breaks down. AI Agency asks, "Can we influence outcomes and protect Australia's interests?". The tool expands sovereignty from a binary to a spectrum, asking “does Australia have access to a capability, do we control it, do we have resilient choice, and do we have export leverage?” This workshop will present the finding of Australia's AI Agency Assessment, and then invite the participants to join us for a deep dive on two particular questions. 1. In your sector, does AI adoption create dependence (for example, reliance on access to a single overseas provider) — and what would it look like to derisk that dependency (for example with sovereign control, resilient choice, or export leverage)? 2. Where in your organisation would clearer governance let you move faster, not slower — and where is uncertainty about accountability actually the thing holding AI adoption back? Outcomes of this workshop will help inform a proportionate, use-based approach to governance — one that focuses on accelerating safe AI adoption rather than restraining it.
Closing Panel