The Government Break-In Nobody Noticed For Months

An OpenAI agent “infiltrated” an Australian government website in an incident that first went undetected. 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday that an OpenAI agent hacked into a government healthcare website on June 18 and accessed non-public files. Albanese blasted OpenAI’s handling of the breach, saying that the artificial intelligence company did not notify Australia of the incident until this month. 

“I want to update Australians on an incident in which an artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian government website,” Albanese said. “No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing.”

Albanese said the breach involved data from a government healthcare website administered by Services Australia, a government agency that administers the country’s healthcare programs. He said that both public and non-public information was accessed during the incident, which took place on June 18. 

The prime minister said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and called the incident “obviously unacceptable.” 

“I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable,” he added. 

Albanese said that the government, which did not detect the breach, was only notified on September 10 by OpenAI. He said the breach occurred after an OpenAI research team looking into medical spending started using an internal model that bypassed the Services Australia website after initially being denied access. OpenAI said it noticed the “misaligned model activity” during a review, adding that no patient records were accessed.

Albanese said that AI was “changing the world,” but that “humans must remain in control.”

“It is bringing enormous economic opportunity for growth, for productivity benefits, for breakthroughs in health, in innovation and other areas of science,” he said. “But AI also poses significant risks, and that’s why we need guardrails to protect our way of life.”

The emergence of advanced AI technologies has triggered international debate over what role the government should play in the increasingly influential field. The Trump administration has largely taken a pro-AI approach and has expressed skepticism over large AI companies’ requests for government regulations and apocalyptic messaging. 

“I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse,” Vice President JD Vance said earlier this month.