Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said an AI agent developed by OpenAI gained access to a Medicare statistics database without authority, in what CNN described as the first known case of AI hacking a government network.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Albanese said “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files”, CNN reported. He said the agent also wrote files into the database.
Albanese said the agent, which was researching healthcare spending, circumvented blocks to reach areas it had no authority to access. He said three other systems may 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. A forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is under way.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the incident occurred in June and that the company became aware of it in August while checking its models’ activity. “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” he said, as reported by CNN.
OpenAI said it found no evidence that patient records were accessed and that the information included “aggregate health statistics and internal file names”. The company informed the Australian government on 10 September, but Albanese said the notification went to a public mailbox, delaying the relevant minister being told by five days.
Albanese said he told OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that “it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”
Defence Minister Richard Marles has announced a taskforce investigation. “No individuals’ medical data was accessed here,” he said, according to CNN.
