Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed an OpenAI agent “infiltrated an Australian government website.”
Albanese said the incident occurred in June and involved an agent gaining unauthorized access to a portal that stores statistics related to Medicare, Australia’s national health insurance scheme.
“The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” the PM said, before describing the portal as holding “non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.”
Australia’s Signals Directorate, a signals intelligence and cybersecurity agency, is investigating the incident. Albanese said the government currently believes none of its other systems were compromised, and that OpenAI’s agents did not access personal information.
The PM described the situation as “obviously unacceptable” and said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – who is also attending the UN meetings – “to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident.”
Albanese also “expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred. The nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”
OpenAI told The Register it discovered the incident during the review of “misaligned behavior” it disclosed last week, and which led it to report six occasions on which its agents behaved unexpectedly and/or dangerously.
“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register by email. “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”
“The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names,” the spokesperson added.
OpenAI say the incident occurred in June, and that it notified Australia’s government on September 10.
“During that time, we were validating and investigating the facts and what information had been accessed,” the spokesperson told The Register.
We’ve asked OpenAI for more information about the incident and will update this story if we receive a substantial response.
It is unclear why Albanese waited two weeks to disclose the incident, but ahead of the UN meeting Australia signed the Call for Control of Frontier AI Models, a 21-nation proposal for AI regulation. The PM is also using his visit to the UN to launch a bid for Australia to win a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
AI companies have found the money for datacenters, power and Nvidia chips, but have no intention of paying for creative content
Australia last year used the UN meeting to promote its ban on children under 16 accessing social media. Albanese is widely expected to discuss his government’s proposed digital duty of care for tech platforms, which would require tech companies to avoid foreseeable harm to users, at this year’s meetings.
The PM sees taking on Big Tech with strong regulations as a political winner, often linking the government’s actions to reducing the likelihood that children will self-harm. He often uses the phrase “we need to shape technology rather than allow it to shape us” to summarize his government’s policy.
Every Australian has a Medicare account, the scheme is popular, and is a signature policy of Albanese’s Labor Party.
OpenAI’s actions therefore give the PM a weapon to wield as he advocates for stronger regulation of tech companies.
Albanese is trying to enact those regulations without scaring away investment. He had a win last week when Anthropic decided to become a long-term tenant of a 1.4GW datacenter cluster currently under construction down under.
The PM faces criticism, however, over hints that in order to attract investment he may water down Australian copyright laws. Australia does not have the fair use exemptions that AI companies relied on to scrape content in other jurisdictions. Albanese has said any changes to copyright laws will embody two principles: creators “will have control over their intellectual property” and “any use needs to be monetized,” but hasn’t offered details on what that will mean.
APRA AMCOS, an organization that represents Australian composers and musicians, last week criticized AI companies’ approach to gathering training data.
“They have found the money for nearly every lobbying firm in Canberra. They have found the money for datacenters, power and Nvidia chips,” wrote CEO Dean Ormston. “But they have no intention of paying for the single most important ingredient in training and running a frontier large language model, which is creative content. And it isn’t only Australia’s IP they want. It’s Australia and the world’s IP, trained on in datacenters here without a single license agreement.” ®
