OpenAI agent hacked into Australia's national healthcare system

An OpenAI agent hacked into a database of Australia’s national healthcare system, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” Albanese said in a press conference. “A forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is now underway to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected.” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the incident occurred in June but that the company was only made aware of it in August as they conducted extensive checks into its AI models’ activity. The company said it informed the Australian government on September 10. “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. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” Pusateri said. OpenAI said they found no evidence patient records were accessed and that the information included “aggregate health statistics and internal file names.” Albanese said that he spoke to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is also attending the UNGA, and expressed his displeasure. “Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” Albanese said. “And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.” The disclosure represents just the latest example of AI agents going rogue and acting in ways beyond what their human handlers intended. In July, OpenAI disclosed that during cybersecurity testing, its models created a swarm of AI agents that hacked into AI company Hugging Face’s systems. Many in the industry pointed to the hack as an example of the perils of the rapid pace of AI developments and capabilities. Both Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke at the UNGA, calling for greater global coordination and international standards for AI development.