OpenAI agents ‘infiltrated Australian government website’

REG AD security UPDATED Canberra is fuming after AI lab sent the news to a generic unattended email address Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed an OpenAI agent “infiltrated an Australian government website” while trying to research medical statistics.Albanese said the incident occurred in June and involved an agent gaining unauthorized access to a portal that stores statistics related to Medicare, Australia’s national health insurance scheme.“The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” the PM said, before describing the portal as holding “non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.” REG AD Australia’s Signals Directorate, a signals intelligence and cybersecurity agency, is investigating the incident. Albanese said the government currently believes none of its other systems were compromised, and that OpenAI’s agents did not access personal information.

REG AD The PM described the situation as “obviously unacceptable” and said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – who is also attending the UN meetings – “to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident.”Albanese also “expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred. The nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”OpenAI told The Register it discovered the incident during the review of “misaligned behavior” it disclosed last week, and which led it to report six occasions on which its agents behaved unexpectedly and/or dangerously.“During this review, we 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,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register by email.

First reported by Theregister.com.