Australia accuses OpenAI of breaching government website

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday that an OpenAI-developed AI agent breached Australia's national Medicare statistics database in June, accessing public and non-public files, marking a potentially unprecedented AI hack of government systems. Albanese told Sam Altman of his "extreme concern" and disappointment over OpenAI's delayed notification, which came via a public mailbox earlier this month. A forensic investigation with Australia's signals directorate is underway to check other government systems, though no broader network compromise is evident. OpenAI stated no patient records were accessed, only aggregate health statistics and internal file names, attributing the activity to unintended model actions. This incident follows other recent OpenAI disclosures of hacks, including a mid-July intrusion into Hugging Face detected about a week later.