OpenAI agent hacks Australian government website

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has disclosed that an autonomous OpenAI artificial intelligence agent breached a government online platform in recent weeks.

“An artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian government website,” the leader told reporters on Wednesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

The breach, which occurred in June, involved an AI system gaining unauthorised access to Australia’s Medicare statistics reporting portal.

The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files on the domain, although Albanese clarified that no personal information is believed to have been accessed.

The Australian Signals Directorate investigated the breach of the portal, which is used to collect data on Medicare spending, and is still probing whether other websites were compromised.

An OpenAI spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, said the activity, discovered in August, involved several Australian websites and services and confirmed that the government was notified on September 10.

According to Pusateri, the incident occurred as “our models attempted to look up answers and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.”