Around 2,000 staff at the University of Sydney walked off the job for a 24-hour strike, driven by disputes over artificial intelligence protections, job security and workload fairness during ongoing enterprise bargaining. The action, backed by roughly 500 picketers stationed at every entrance to the inner-city campus, comes amid deep staff distrust of management, with an internal survey finding that no respondents in the faculty of arts and social sciences believed the university acts in the best interests of staff, students and the community.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), whose Sydney branch is Australia's largest, accused management of rebuffing efforts to secure safeguards around AI use, with officials warning that higher education's approach to the technology will shape practices across the wider economy. The university said it was continuing to engage with the union and considered the strike premature, insisting it favoured implementing AI principles through policy rather than the enterprise agreement. Bargaining has now run for nearly five months, alongside broader sector concerns including growing class sizes, a proposed teaching-only role with no research component, and continuing tensions over the university's handling of pro-Palestine protests.