OpenAI agents ‘infiltrated Australian government website’

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.

Australia last year used the UN meeting to promote its ban on children under 16 accessing social media.