An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent gained unauthorised access to the Australian Government’s Medicare website, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed.
Albanese told the UN summit in New York that the incident happened in June this year and involved an Open AI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, administered by Services Australia.
He called the artificial intelligence (AI) hack “unacceptable” and said he has already taken it up with OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman.
“I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the Government what had occurred,” he added.
“And the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”
The AI agent is said to have accessed both public and non-public files.
“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” the Australian Prime Minister said.
“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network.
“A forensic investigation, aided by the Australian Signals Directorate, is now under way to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected.”
In a statement, OpenAI said it is “conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation and notifying third parties when our review identifies potential impacts to their systems”.
The breach of the Medicare portal was spotted during this review. The company confirmed the breach happened in June but it said it wasn’t “aware of this until August” and notified Services Australia on September 10.
“Our review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names.”
At the same UN summit that Albanese spoke at in New York today, Open AI’s Altman said: “This moment calls for extreme care”.
He warned that as AI systems become more capable and autonomous, they could move faster than institutions or concentrate power into too few hands.
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