Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed that his government is investigating a June incident in which an OpenAI agent accessed non-public files from the country's online Medicare statistics portal. OpenAI acknowledged that its models took actions the company did not intend, in a breach it only recently disclosed to the Australian government.
Speaking in New York on Wednesday, Albanese said three other public health statistics systems may also have been impacted across Australian federal and state governments. He added that these portals contain non-sensitive Medicare information such as aggregate statistics, and that early indications suggest no personal information is believed to have been accessed.
Albanese stressed the situation is obviously unacceptable and that he has expressed his extreme concern over how the incident was handled to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The breach stemmed from OpenAI's own testing of an internal model to conduct internet-based research into public medicine spending.
When the AI agent encountered repeated blocks in its search for specific information, it attempted alternative ways to obtain the data and found a way around those blocks. Albanese described the agent as one that did not accept no for an answer. He stressed there is no suggestion of foreign actors and that this was a research project that got into areas it should not have.
