OpenAI Agent Hacked Into Australia’s Medicare Database, Prime Minister Says

0:00Anthony Albanese: An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government national healthcare database earlier this year, the country's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Wednesday, in what appears to be the first known incident of an artificial intelligent agent breaching a major government database. The breach occurred on June 18th, but OpenAI first learned about it in August and began an investigation. On September 10th, OpenAI sent an email to the public inbox of Services Australia, which oversees the country's Medicare services, to inform it about the breach. Albanese addressed the incident on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, noting that the OpenAI agent accessed a public-facing Australian Medicare statistics portal.

0:45The Australian prime minister said the agent accessed both public and non-public files, but it didn't appear anyone's personal Medicare details were affected. Albanese said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the phone and expressed Australia's extreme concern about the incident and said the company's response to the incident was, quote, unacceptable. In an emailed statement shared with Forbes, an OpenAI spokesperson said the breach was discovered during its, quote, extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation. During its review, the company, quote, 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.

1:34In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend. Our review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names. For more on this story, check out the article at the link in the description.