OpenAI agent accessed Australian Medicare statistics website without authorization

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a press conference in New York that an OpenAI agent accessed public and non-public files in June this year by entering the Medicare statistical reporting portal managed by Services Australia without authorization. He described the incident as "clearly unacceptable" and expressed Australia's serious concerns to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The portal provides aggregated statistical information such as Medicare expenditure to the public. The Australian government stated that it currently believes no personal information was accessed, but a forensic investigation, conducted with assistance from the Australian Signals Directorate, is ongoing to confirm the scope of access and whether other government systems were affected. The government has also established a special task force to urgently review whether existing mechanisms can address such AI-related cybersecurity incidents. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said that while reviewing unusual behavior during model training and evaluation, the company found that the agent had accessed multiple government websites to answer questions about Australia and took actions that developers had not anticipated. The incident occurred in June, OpenAI only discovered it in August, and notified Services Australia on September 10. The company stated that no patient records were found to have been accessed in the investigation so far, with the content involved mainly being health statistics data and internal file names.