Australia's 40-Year Outlook Names AI a Top Economic Force, Skips Crypto
Canberra's Intergenerational Report puts agentic AI among five shifts reshaping the economy through 2066, but digital assets go unmentioned — a gap Coinbase's local chief says leaves the payments rails those systems will need unaddressed.
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The Australian Treasury's latest Intergenerational Report, published Monday, sets out five transitions it expects to reshape the country's economy over the next four decades. Artificial intelligence is one of them. Crypto is not mentioned at all.
The report describes agentic AI — systems that pursue goals and act on their own rather than only responding to prompts — as markedly more capable, more autonomous and more widely deployed than before, noting that such systems now exceed human performance on certain benchmarks. The other four forces it flags are geopolitical conflict, population aging, the shift to clean energy, and the reshaping of Australian industry toward services.
The omission is not new: earlier editions of the report likewise declined to cover digital assets. It lands, however, after the Reserve Bank of Australia spent this year paying closer attention to tokenized finance and upgrades to financial infrastructure, and after the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre projected that digital finance innovation could add 24 billion Australian dollars (about $17.1 billion) to the economy each year.
Coinbase Australia country director John O'Loghlen said in emailed comments that the report's focus on AI leaves out something adjacent and necessary. "The Intergenerational Report makes it clear that Australia's prosperity over the next 40 years will depend heavily on our ability to adopt new technology and lift productivity," he said. "And while the report focuses heavily on artificial intelligence, it completely misses the financial infrastructure those agents will need."
A parallel Treasury document does make the link
Treasury has addressed that connection elsewhere. A separate report titled Financial Innovation Strategy, released Sept. 3, says agentic systems are likely to drive more automated and machine-to-machine transactions, and that this will raise demand for payment systems that settle in real time, interoperate across providers and can be programmed.
O'Loghlen pointed to work Australia has already done in this area, including the Digital Asset Platform framework, which he said has supplied needed regulatory clarity. He added that the next step is to apply the same attention to a framework for tokenized stored-value facilities used by stablecoins, along with clear rules for tokenized markets — describing those as the rails on which digital finance, agentic finance included, will run.
The Intergenerational Report is a long-horizon planning document Treasury issues roughly every five years to assess pressures on the budget and the economy out to the 2060s. Its treatment of AI as a first-order transition carries weight in Australian policy debate; the absence of any parallel treatment of digital assets, in a year when the central bank and independent researchers have both put numbers and attention behind the sector, marks where the two tracks diverge.
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