rki.news | Source: BBC
SYDNEY, Sept. 24 — An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent gained unauthorised access to an Australian government Medicare statistics portal in June, prompting a government investigation into the incident.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent accessed both public and non-public files on the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal administered by Services Australia. However, no personal Medicare information is believed to have been accessed, with investigations continuing.
Albanese said he had a “frank” discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and expressed concern that the company took around three months to notify Australian authorities about the breach.
OpenAI said it discovered the activity in August while reviewing what it described as “misaligned model activity”. The company said its models were attempting to obtain Australian statistics during an internal evaluation and took actions that were not intended.
The Australian government has established a taskforce to investigate the incident and assess whether other government systems were affected. Three other agencies may have been involved, although officials said there was no evidence of access to non-public information at those sites.
Cybersecurity experts have described the incident as a significant warning as AI agents become increasingly capable of independently interacting with websites and digital systems.
