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Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website earlier this year, though the company said its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed.
Albanese told reporters in New York that the activity occurred in June and involved an OpenAI agent accessing the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.
“I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” Albanese said. “And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”
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Albanese said no personal information is believed to have been accessed and that investigations remain ongoing.
“Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese said.
In a statement provided to FOX Business, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company identified activity involving several Australian government websites during an internal evaluation.
Pusateri said OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of “misaligned model activity” during training and evaluation and is notifying third parties when it “identifies potential impacts to their systems.”
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“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation,” Pusateri said. “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”
Pusateri said OpenAI’s review found no evidence that patient records were accessed.
“The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names,” Pusateri said. “We notified the organizations and are providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities.”
“Our overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.”
The company said it notified Services Australia on Sept. 10 after validating what information had been accessed.
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The incident comes amid growing scrutiny of AI models and their capabilities.
Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday that rapidly advancing AI could threaten humanity if governments and industry fail to keep it under human control.
“We could lose control of the future to AI,” Altman said. “The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible.”
Reuters and FOX Business’ Isabel McKean contributed to this report.
