Treasury put Treaty obligations on the balance sheet
The shift happened quietly, across three official documents in barely 12 months, and most businesses missed it entirely.
In July 2024, Treasury published an analytical note stating that generative AI tools “may cut across Māori data sovereignty, undermining tikanga and creating a risk of commercial exploitation” with unknown implications for te reo Māori and taonga including tā moko, haka and waiata. Treasury went further, noting that “Te Tiriti requires extra consideration of Māori rights and interests” and that “the Crown has a duty of active protection with respect to Māori rights and interests in taonga, which include intangibles such as language and facets of Māori knowledge and culture.”
This is the agency that prices everything, placing Treaty obligations squarely on the ledger as a constraint on AI deployment.
In June 2025, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s Long-term Insights Briefing escalated the language. It stated that “the advent of GenAI, and specifically large language models has created new risks in the misappropriation and exploitation of Māori cultural intellectual property.” It cited Associate Professor Te Taka Keegan’s warning that “AI tools like ChatGPT are already learning from data they should not necessarily have access to, enabling it to engage in cultural activities such as speaking te reo Māori, composing waiata and writing karakia.” The briefing canvassed options including “a new regulatory framework” to “explicitly regulate AI-generated cultural content”.
Then in July 2025, MBIE’s AI strategy confirmed that Te Puni Kōkiri “is exploring ways to support the appropriate use of cultural IP and prevent commercial misappropriation.” Three agencies, three documents, one direction.
The legal vacuum that protects nobody
The problem right now is not too much regulation. It is almost none, and that gap creates risk on both sides.
Newsroom reported in September 2024 that New Zealand law cannot protect the world-leading te reo Māori AI database held by Te Hiku Media, the same resource that earned its creator international recognition. The gap between global acclaim and domestic legal protection is stark.
Indigenous IP expert Lynell Tuffery Huria put it directly in The Spinoff in April 2025: “The copyright system has been set up without regard for a Māori perspective, and doesn’t really take into account how we might treat or deal with kupu Māori or Māori imagery or Māori artworks.” Her warning was blunt: “They’re taking our taonga and repackaging it for profit without consent.”
By March 2026, Dr Karaitiana Taiuru had published a formal response, the He Tangata, He Karetao, He Ātārangi Indigenous Peoples AI framework, designed to help Māori organisations evaluate whether AI systems align with tikanga. His concern remains pointed: “AI systems trained primarily on global datasets may reproduce cultural bias or exclude Indigenous knowledge entirely.”
Businesses currently have no clear legal safe harbour, but that does not mean they have no exposure.
Where the commercial risk actually sits
MBIE’s strategy projects that adopting generative AI could add $76 billion to the New Zealand economy by 2038, with 67% of larger businesses already using AI. The government is simultaneously pushing hard for adoption and building the architecture to constrain how it happens.
For businesses, the exposure points are concrete. Training internal AI models on customer or operational data that includes Māori language or cultural material without consent frameworks is a live risk. Purchasing offshore AI tools from vendors like Meta, Google or OpenAI, with no visibility into training data, is another. As Crown agencies face Treaty obligations, procurement criteria for AI tools will tighten. Suppliers who cannot demonstrate cultural IP compliance will lose government contracts.
Government guidance already warns that when organisations use offshore AI providers, “data is controlled by the laws of the country where service providers store, process, or send the data,” creating liability exposure that most procurement teams have not priced in.
The smart money is building governance now
The businesses that will be caught flat-footed are those treating AI as a pure productivity tool with no governance dimension. The Taiuru framework and Te Kāhui Raraunga’s data sovereignty principles both provide operational tools that companies engaging with Māori communities or data could adopt today, ahead of any regulatory mandate.
The legal vacuum will not last. When it closes, it will close around whatever practices have already been established. Building a defensible governance framework now is cheaper than retrofitting one after the first case is litigated, and considerably cheaper than losing a government contract because your AI vendor scraped a waiata it had no right to touch.
Sources
- Treasury AN 24/06: The impact of artificial intelligence – an economic analysis (2024-07)
- Ministry for Culture and Heritage: Long-term Insights Briefing 2025 (2025-06-04)
- Newsroom: Law can’t protect world-leading te reo Māori AI database (2024-09-12)
- The Spinoff: What happens to taonga Māori in the age of AI? (2025-04-03)
- Waatea News: Indigenous AI Framework Offers Path for Māori (2026-03-11)
- Digital.govt.nz: Māori, Pacific Peoples, ethnic communities and GenAI