OpenAI agent “didn’t accept no for an answer” in Australian government breach

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said 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 said in a statement that “our models took actions we did not intend” in causing the breach, which it only recently disclosed to the Australian government.

Speaking in New York on Wednesday, Albanese said three other public health statistics systems also “may 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.”

That said, Albanese stressed that the “situation is obviously unacceptable” and that he has expressed his “extreme concern” over how the incident was handled to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Much like the now-infamous Hugging Face hacking incident, Albanese said this system breach stemmed from OpenAI’s own testing of an internal model, this time to conduct “Internet based research into public medicine spending.” When the company’s AI agent encountered “repeated blocks” in its search for specific information, Albanese said, it “attempted alternative ways to obtain the info” and “found a way around those blocks.”

“[It] didn’t accept no for an answer, if you like,” Albanese said. “There is no suggestion of foreign actors here. This is a research project that has got into areas that it shouldn’t have.”

In a statement provided to multiple outlets, OpenAI said it had “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.”