Albanese says OpenAI did not alert the Australian government to breach until 10 September
- Bookmark
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.
[Join today](https://www.independent.co.uk/subscribe?regSourceMethod=Bookmarks)
Already a member?
[Log in](#)
Anthony Albanese has revealed that an autonomous artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI breached a government website containing health data of Australians, in what could be the first known instance of AI breach of a government body.
Speaking to reporters in New York on Wednesday, the Australian prime minister said the AI agent, while carrying out a research task on health and medical statistics, accessed both public and non-public data on the Medicare portal run by Services Australia in June.
Australia's deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, told ABC radio that the agent had approached three other Australian websites in the course of its research and interacted with them "in a way that a member of the public might", acting in an authorised way.
But he said that when it sought information from the Medicare portal and was refused, "it effectively hacked into that medical portal and got that information anyway".
"It's that unauthorised access which we are very concerned about," Mr Marles said. "The impact is relatively minor, but the incident is very serious."
Mr Albanese said OpenAI did not alert the Australian government to the breach until 10 September, when it sent an email to a generic public mailbox, three months after the incident occurred.
"Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Mr Albanese said, adding that he had also told Mr Altman he was disappointed it had taken the company "way too long" to inform the government of what had happened.
OpenAI said in a statement issued after the press conference that it was still investigating the incident but had found no evidence that patient records had been accessed.
The company said its review had identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as its "models attempted to look up answers".
Mr Albanese said there was no evidence of a wider compromise of the government's services network and that no personal information was believed to have been accessed, though investigations were continuing.
The disclosure came less than a day after Mr Albanese co-signed a joint statement with 21 other countries, including Canada, Spain and Germany, calling for "urgent global guardrails" on frontier AI models, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
The breach also followed a UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday at which AI company leaders warned of the risks of unregulated development. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian researcher regarded as one of the "godfathers of AI" and co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, spoke of an "unprecedented threat" and dangers he described as "real and imminent".
China's UN ambassador, Fu Cong, told the meeting that Beijing believed continuous improvement of regulatory frameworks, emergency response and cross-border cooperation on AI was needed, while British prime minister Andy Burnham said the UK was ready to lead an international effort to establish AI standards.
"We've all heard the warnings which we must heed… so we have to rise to this moment," Mr Burnham said.
French president Emmanuel Macron warned against allowing the US and China to dominate global decision-making on AI in his address to the assembly.
US president Donald Trump struck a different tone, telling world leaders at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that he opposed new regulation of AI and that US law enforcement would step in if needed.
"We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice," Mr Trump said.
He has dismissed recent warnings about AI's dangers as a "hoax", saying: "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.”
He also said US government documents would use the term "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence going forward.
The White House's science and technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, echoed the US president in his remarks to the Security Council.
"You cannot govern technology you do not understand. This body and others like it should focus on sharing best practices to build domestic capacity, not establishing a global regulatory scheme."
Join our commenting forum #
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments