OpenAI’s breach of Australian health dept website prompts rebuke from Albanese - TimesLIVE

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday he is extremely concerned about OpenAI‘s breach of an Australian health department website — and that the artificial intelligence (AI) company took too long to reveal the incident.

An OpenAI agent infiltrated the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18, he said. The portal hosted aggregate data about health spending and drug subsidies and is popular with researchers and academics. No personal information had been accessed, the government said.

Albanese made the breach public after a telephone conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Both are in New York to address the UN General Assembly.

Altman was among heads of major AI firms who in speeches on Wednesday pleaded with the UN to save the world or at least its people by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology they have been designing.

“Today I spoke to Altman to express Australia’s extreme concern about the incident,” Albanese told reporters. “I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred. The nature of the way that notification occurred was also unacceptable.”

OpenAI said it had reviewed activity involving several Australian government departments and discovered “our models took actions we did not intend”.

The company notified Australia of the breach in an e-mail to a government department’s generic address on September 10, Albanese said.

Albanese said he assumed there were commercial reasons for the AI investigation of how much was being spent on particular medicines and where expenditures were changing.

Government services minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI had advised on September 10 that an “AI agent had accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing” portal. OpenAI shared with the government the vulnerability the agent had found.

The Australian government had not been confident it knew what the agent had been doing until officials held a technical briefing with OpenAI on Tuesday, Gallagher said. She said the portal had been closed and the data moved to more secure systems.

It was not sitting behind a particularly high fence. This AI agent scaled the fence and the point is it was unintended. It wasn’t asked to. That’s our concern

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the incident was the first time an AI agent was known to have gained unauthorised access to the Australian government’s information technology systems.

“This is a warning about the technology being developed without safeguards and without guardrails in place,” Marles said.

OpenAI was engaging with the government but the situation was “fundamentally unacceptable”, he said. When the agent was denied information, it engaged in “misaligned behaviour” to gain unauthorised access.

Marles said the information accessed was “not particularly sensitive” and had since been made public.

He used an analogy of the information sitting behind a fence: “It was not sitting behind a particularly high fence. This AI agent scaled the fence and the point is it was unintended. It wasn’t asked to. That’s our concern.”