OpenAI’s agent hacked an Australian government website. What we know so far

Concerns around the dangers of artificial intelligence are escalating sharply after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed on Wednesday that a government website has been hacked by an OpenAI agent.

The June hack targeted the website for Medicare, Australia’s publicly funded universal health insurance plan, he said.

“I want to update Australians on an incident in which an artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian government website. This incident occurred in June this year and involved an open AI agent gaining unauthorized access into the public facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal,” Albanese told reporters in New York Wednesday, where he is attending a session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The AI agent accessed “both public and non-public files,” Albanese said.

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

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The company notified Australia of the breach in an email to a government department’s generic address on Sept. 10, Albanese said.

“I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” he said, adding that he was forming a task force to “to provide an urgent and immediate review into this incident to determine whether existing processes are appropriate to respond to AI-related cyber incidents.”

Global News has reached out to AI Minister Evan Solomon’s office asking whether Canada also plans to review its safety regulations in light of the Australian hack.

Australia’s Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI had advised on Sept. 10 that an “AI agent had accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing” portal. OpenAI shared with the government the vulnerability the agent had found.

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The Australian government had not been confident that it knew what the agent had been doing until officials held a technical briefing with OpenAI on Tuesday, Gallagher said.

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

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Altman was among heads of major AI firms who in speeches Wednesday to the United Nations called for regulating the fast-expanding technology that companies like his have been designing, despite the companies themselves taking few, if any, steps to scale back developments or wait for regulations.

“We could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed,” Altman told the United Nations.

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“This would obviously be terrible,” he added.

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While this is the first time a government website has been hacked by a rogue AI agent, it is not the first such incident overall.

In July, OpenAI revealed that its artificial intelligence system escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a task.

Since then, OpenAI’s rival company Anthropic said its AI models hacked into three other organizations during testing, triggering a company review into whether the models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off.

Meta has said a “misconfiguration” during testing resulted in an AI model accessing the internet on its own and hacking another company. Google recently made a similar disclosure.