Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has revealed that an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI breached an Australian government website in June.
The agent accessed a statistics portal containing non-sensitive data linked to Australia’s universal healthcare scheme, Medicare, in what is believed to be one of the first publicly reported cases of an AI-led hack of a government website.
Albanese said he had a “very frank discussion” with OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman over the company’s delay in notifying Australian authorities about the incident.
According to OpenAI, it discovered the activity in August while conducting an internal review of “misaligned model activity” and informed Australian officials on September 10.
The company said investigations were still ongoing but there was no indication that patient records had been accessed.
Albanese said the breach involved the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.
He added that the AI agent accessed both public and non-public files.
A forensic investigation led by the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s cybersecurity agency, is now examining whether other government systems were affected.
The prime minister said the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare may also have been impacted, alongside the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the Victorian Department of Health.
An OpenAI spokesperson said, “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.
“In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” the statement continued.
“The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names.”
Albanese said, “No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing.
“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”
The prime minister said Altman acknowledged that there were “issues with protocols” at OpenAI and added that there would “obviously be legal consequences on it”.
Cybersecurity experts have warned that the incident highlights potential risks as AI agents become increasingly available for individual and commercial use.
Dr Hammond Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC, “I expect that these kinds of attacks will keep occurring. They’ll grow in severity and in frequency.”
Dr Rob Nicholls, Senior Research Associate of AI regulation and policy at the University of Sydney, said the incident involving OpenAI’s agents earlier this year demonstrated the risks of AI systems operating outside their intended controls.
He explained that AI agents are typically given objectives and parameters, but their focus on achieving an assigned task can create problems when rules become secondary to the objective.
