Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website

SYDNEY: Australia said on Wednesday (Sep 23) an OpenAI agent breached a government health data portal in June, gaining unauthorised access to files, in what could be the first known instance of an AI agent hacking a government website.

The breach is one of the highest-profile incidents of AI agents accessing external systems outside the United States, coming on top of several recent breaches globally by rogue AI agents that have alarmed governments and companies.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to the medical statistics portal of a government agency responsible for non-sensitive health data and statistics, including public medical spending.

“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the … network. Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese said during a media briefing in New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly.

Investigations continue and Australia had voiced its “extreme concern about this incident” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Albanese said, adding that he was deeply disappointed by the company’s delay in notifying the government.

“It took until Sep 10 before there was any notification at all,” Albanese said, adding that the investigation would also examine why government systems had failed to detect the breach in the first place.

He also warned that three other government websites “may be impacted” by the OpenAI agent’s activity.

“The question is, when it was trying to harvest data, did it go into these other sites? So we’re not confirming that that occurred,” he said.

The incident comes after OpenAI and Anthropic, in separate submissions to a parliamentary inquiry this month, urged Australia to reconsider a ban preventing them from using the country’s creative content to train their models.