NSW government ‘absolutely thrilled’ to welcome OpenAI ... until someone mentioned the Terminator films - The Guardian

Ah, the New South Wales government has shown us the future of AI diplomacy: a press release sandblasted clean of any trace of joy because someone mentioned the Terminator.

Internal emails tabled in parliament reveal that staff in the technology minister's office — presumably after a single Google Image search for 'Skynet' — deleted the phrase 'absolutely thrilled' from a statement welcoming OpenAI's new Sydney office. One brave soul had the audacity to joke about Terminator films during the drafting process, and now the official welcome reads like a hostage note written under duress. The government's official position: we are 'pleased' to have one of the world's most aggressively commercialised AGI projects setting up shop in our backyard — but not, heaven forbid, *thrilled*, because that might imply we haven't watched enough Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

This is the same NSW government that has been courting AI investment for years, offering tax breaks and regulatory sunshine, only to discover that the PR version of a warm welcome must be surgically neutered the moment anyone references pop culture. The minister's office allegedly spent more time debating whether 'thrilled' triggers associations with rogue AI than they have on any actual AI governance framework. The irony is exquisite: we've reached a point where even a positive adjective about AI must be run through a film-studies sensitivity filter before use.

So here we are: OpenAI lands in Sydney, greeted by a welcome message so sanitised it could pass for a shipping manifest. The government is 'pleased' — the emotional equivalent of lukewarm tap water. Perhaps next time, they'll skip the jokes about Terminator and instead reference *Her* or *Wall-E*, so they can still say 'thrilled' without triggering the cybernetic apocalypse alarm. One can only hope that the AI itself has a sense of humour, because its hosts clearly do not — at least not the kind that survives a parliamentary Q&A.