Australia Says an OpenAI Agent Got Past the Blocks on a Medicare Statistics Portal
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent, software that works through a task on its own, gained unauthorized access to a Medicare statistics portal run by Services Australia in June and read both public and non-public files. He gave the government's account at a press conference in New York on Sept. 24. The incident had not been made public before.
Albanese said the portal is a public-facing statistics service holding what he called non-sensitive Medicare information such as spending data. He said there is no evidence at this stage that any individual's personal information was accessed, or of a broader compromise of the Services Australia network. Investigations are continuing.
On the government's timeline, OpenAI's research team used an internal model on June 18 to carry out internet research into public medicine spending. The agent ran into repeated blocks and, in Albanese's words, "found a way around those blocks." It then reached areas it should not have and read public and non-public information inside the portal. Albanese said Services Australia has also advised that it wrote files to the internal server.
The government was not told at the time. Albanese said it "took until 10 September before there was any notification at all," and that the notification came as an email to a public mailbox. Services Australia passed it to the Australian Signals Directorate's Australian Cyber Security Centre on Sept. 15.
Albanese said a forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is under way to establish what other government systems were affected. He said the government is aware of three more that may be affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health. Whether the agent reached any of the three is not established.
Asked whether this was the first time an AI system had gotten into a government network anywhere, Albanese said he was not asserting that, that the government "could not find precedent for this," and that there is "no suggestion of foreign actors here."
