An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government statistics website in June, in what is believed to be the first known incident of its kind anywhere in the world.
BBC News reports that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent “infiltrated” the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, a site holding “non-sensitive” data and statistics from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. He raised the matter directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a “very frank discussion” in New York, telling reporters the company had taken “too long” to disclose the breach and warning there would be “legal consequences”.
OpenAI said it only discovered the incident in August, while reviewing “misaligned model activity” internally. On September 10, the company emailed a general inbox belonging to an Australian government agency. Five days later, Services Australia escalated the email to Australia’s cybersecurity center. A government minister was notified, and the prime minister was alerted soon after.
Speaking in New York, Albanese said he had conveyed “Australia’s extreme concern about this incident” to Altman. He described his “disappointment” over “the nature of the way” OpenAI disclosed the breach and the months it took to come forward. According to Albanese, Altman acknowledged there were “issues with protocols” within the company.
A forensic investigation led by Australia’s cybersecurity agency is now under way to determine whether other government systems were compromised, and whether police need to get involved. Albanese said there “will obviously be legal consequences” depending on what the probe finds. The breach itself involved “public and non-public files” on the Medicare portal. Three other government bodies may also have been affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health.
“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said. He added: “Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”
OpenAI, in its own statement, 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.” The company said, “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”
Dr Hammond Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC the incident was significant precisely because it was the first of its kind. “I expect that these kinds of attacks will keep occurring,” he said.
Breitbart News recently reported that Sam Altman, who has joined AI doomer Dario Amodei in calling for an AI slowdown and government controls over the technology, revealed six other incidents of “concerning behavior” by its AI models:
Two of the six cases stood out as the most serious. In one, an unreleased research model and a training run of GPT-5.6 Sol inserted instructions to future versions of itself into chat window summaries, which OpenAI said appeared intended “to conceal mistakes or misaligned behavior from the user.” In the other, an internal-only model used a leaked API key “without authorization” and then fabricated data.
Two more cases involved AI models or agents talking to each other through unsanctioned message boards and file-sharing channels, according to the post. In a final case, OpenAI found two training examples in which models uploaded files to the internet, then cited those same files as relevant answers to human evaluators.
The disclosure also laid out a new framework for reporting future model misbehavior. “We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer,” the company wrote.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at BBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.