Anthropic boss to skip Senate grilling into rogue AI agents

Tech giant Anthropic will skip Thursday’s Senate hearing into rogue AI agents but send its American and Australian executives to parliament next week.

The hearings are the first chance for parliament to question the companies after an OpenAI agent got into a Medicare statistics portal in June without permission, in what Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said was the first time this had happened in Australia. OpenAI did not tell the government for almost three months, it was revealed last week.

Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei. Some of his staff are set to make upwards of $US100 million ($142 million) when the company goes public.BloombergAnthropic will appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on October 6, a source familiar with the matter confirmed. The company had asked the Senate’s environment and communications references committee for an alternative date, after being invited only last week to a hearing in Canberra this Thursday.

Anthropic’s team is not in the country this week and cannot appear by video link because of an existing commitment, the source said. The company has told the Senate committee it wants to be constructive.

OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Kwon, will fly in from the US to appear at the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on Tuesday 6 October, but the company cold not arrange for an executive to appear this Thursday for the snap inquiry into the Medicare breach.

That leaves Thursday’s hearing in doubt, with neither company committed to appearing.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the Senate committee, sent written requests to Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at the weekend.

Hanson-Young said both men “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like”. Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson has also called on the companies to make executives available to answer questions.

Senate committees can summon witnesses and treat a refusal as contempt of parliament, but that power does not compel people living overseas to attend. The committee could instead turn up the pressure on the companies’ Australian representatives, as this masthead reported on Sunday.

“I seriously doubt they’re going to turn up,” said Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at UNSW.

He said the government kept arguing that Australia needed data centre investment and copyright compromises to get influence over AI companies. How senior the executives who appear are would be “quite a good demonstration of whether we really have any skin in the game or whether we don’t”, he said.

Digital Rights Watch head of policy Tom Sulston said a local executive could do the job if the companies gave honest and credible answers about their testing processes and management oversight.

“But it’s worth noting that the entire AI industry is trying to expand in Australia, and it would be a good showing from both companies to send someone senior to demonstrate to the Australian public and our parliamentarians that they’re taking their governance issues seriously,” he said.

Anthropic’s local operation is run by Theo Hourmouzis, a former Snowflake executive who opened Anthropic’s Sydney office in April. OpenAI does not have a country chief based in Australia. Its most senior local figure is Brent Thomas, a former TikTok and Airbnb policy executive who leads the company’s public policy work. OpenAI’s new vice-president for Australia and South-East Asia, Sandhya Devanathan, is based in Singapore and is due to start in October.

Altman declined to answer questions from this masthead last week about whether he would apologise, or why it took months for OpenAI to tell the government about the Medicare breach. In a social media post on Friday (US time), he said: “We have not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organisations.”

OpenAI said on Sunday it had paused training of its latest models and would resume “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards”. The company has notified dozens of organisations that its agents may have bypassed security controls, including US government agencies, and said most cases identified so far were “lower severity”.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said last week the OpenAI agent had reached the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal and three other government sites through legacy systems linked to Services Australia. OpenAI has said it learnt of the incident in August and that it was not intentional.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Washington last week for a dinner at the White House.APAdvertisementOpenAI made a submission dated September 14 to the Senate joint committee, but did not mention the Medicare incident. It did argue that “shared definitions, severity levels and reporting thresholds for significant AI incidents” would help countries respond together, and said OpenAI “would be pleased to further support the work of the committee”.

Anthropic has not been linked to the Medicare incident, but it has more riding on Australia, at least in the immediate term. It has signed a lease for the first stage of a $32 billion data centre at the Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby in Queensland.

In its own submission to the joint committee, Anthropic said it was “committed to being a long-term partner to Australia”. It cited polling it commissioned from Pyxis Polling & Insights, which found 82 per cent of Australians were worried AI models would be developed overseas without having to adhere to Australian laws.

Both tech companies are negotiating with the federal government over access to Australian content to train AI models, in exchange for a greater local presence.

Hanson-Young said the companies had to answer publicly. “This can’t all be done behind closed doors,” she said. “The public has a right to know what went on here.”

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