Australia Condemns ‘Unacceptable’ OpenAI Breach of Government Health Portal

An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government health database in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed Wednesday, amid concerns from world leaders and artificial intelligence firms about the industry’s rapid, unregulated expansion.Albanese said the AI agent had accessed public and non-public files in the statistics reporting service portal for Australia’s universal health insurance scheme, Medicare, in June. OpenAI, however, only notified the government of the breach 84 days later—through an email sent to the public mailbox.“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said in a press conference in New York, where he attended the U.N. General Assembly. “Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.”An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement that during a recent review, they 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.” Its AI models then “took actions we did not intend.”The breach follows a string of incidents where AI mode...