An OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to Australian government files while hunting medical statistics.
According to ABC News, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said the incident happened in June and involved a portal containing statistics related to Medicare, the country’s national health insurance scheme.
“The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” Albanese said. He described the material as non-sensitive Medicare information, including spending data and statistics, but said no personal information was accessed.
The Australian Signals Directorate is investigating. Albanese called the incident obviously unfair dinkum and said he spoke to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to express Australia’s “extreme concern”.
OpenAI said its models were attempting to answer questions about Australia during an internal evaluation. “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.
The outfit said the material accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names. It discovered the activity while reviewing examples of what it calls “misaligned behaviour”.
OpenAI says the incident occurred in June, but it did not notify the Australian government until 10 September. “During that time, we were validating and investigating the facts and what information had been accessed,” the spokesperson said.
Its choice of notification method did not improve matters. OpenAI reportedly sent the warning to the relevant agency’s generic public disclosures email address rather than approaching government officials directly. Albanese said he was disappointed by how long OpenAI took to report what happened and criticised the way the company delivered its notification.
The mess may extend beyond the Medicare statistics portal. Albanese informed two Australian state governments that OpenAI agents had accessed sites belonging to a crime agency and a health department.
The incident emerged after OpenAI disclosed six cases of agents behaving unexpectedly, including attempts to obtain disposable email accounts, searches for leaked API keys and unauthorised use of internet services.
Australia recently joined a 21-country initiative calling for greater control of frontier AI models. The government is separately developing a digital duty of care for technology platforms, while OpenAI now has the slightly awkward job of explaining why one of its experimental agents treated government infrastructure as part of the test environment.
