Australia has launched an urgent review of its AI governance and cybersecurity arrangements, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday, after an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to a government Medicare statistics portal, BBC reported.
The incident happened on June 18, when an agent from OpenAI, working on research about public spending on medicine, circumvented restrictions and accessed public and non-public files on the Services Australia portal. According to Albanese, no personal Medicare information was accessed.
The government said the portal contained aggregated health statistics, not individual medical records and there was no indication of a wider breach of the Services Australia network.
Albanese claimed to have spoken with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to express Australia’s “extreme concern” and chastised the company for taking too long to alert authorities.
The government’s task force will be headed by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and include the Australian Signals Directorate, Office of AI, Australian AI Safety Institute and Services Australia. It will discuss the incident, government network security and legal framework for cyber incidents related to AI.
OpenAI said the model’s behaviour wasn’t intentional, and said it was still investigating the breach.
