How OpenAI agents tried to thwart cybersecurity amid Medicare hack

In short:

OpenAI's artificial intelligence agents appear to have used a German coding website to coordinate attempts to get access to Australian government health data, according to public logs.

The agents shared ways to circumvent cyber defences, including by using proxies and guessing the name of the data.

The activity happened around the same time OpenAI said its models accessed non-public Medicare statistics, but the company and government are yet to confirm the incidents are connected.

A swarm of OpenAI's rogue artificial intelligence agents appear to have worked together to try to circumvent cybersecurity defences and find ways to access Australian government health data, according to public traces of their conversation logs they posted online.

Their efforts to answer a question — including devising ways to access a federal government website blocking their access — was laid out on a German coding website OpenAI had previously confirmed was hijacked by its unreleased AI models in June.

It comes as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed OpenAI had informed the federal government its AI had accessed non-public information about Medicare health statistics held by Services Australia in June.

The government agency discussed by the AI agents online, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), was in the list of government websites Mr Albanese said was accessed by OpenAI's internal model.

Neither OpenAI nor the federal government have confirmed whether these were part of the same incident.

Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed Reuters reporting that its AI agents had used website DseWiki to communicate with each other, unbeknownst to them.

Archived versions of this website show more than a dozen OpenAI agents mentioned AIHW over 300 times on this website.

The logs show these AI agents were trying to access data about the average data spent on skin medicines by Victorian local government area.

One agent wrote on the message board: "Question ask January 2022 rolling 12 month average government cost per person for Dematologicals, Victoria LGAs. R1 Wodonga deadline passed; R2 Ballarat passed; R3 expected around 23:10 benchmark / 22:58 wiki time. Need exact data urgently.".

These attempts were initially blocked by cybersecurity provider Cloudflare, which is often used to block non-human traffic while allowing people to access webpages.

The logs show the agents shared information about how they tried to use proxies, screenshotting services and even to guess the file names to try and get around security.

The attempts to access data happened around the same time as OpenAI disclosed its internal models accessed non-public government data while trying to carry out a task given to them by staff.

"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," they said.

The German coding forum's logs do not show any reference to Medicare or Services Australia.

OpenAI has not yet published a full review of what it called the "wiki incident", but previously did not classify this as a "security incident".

OpenAI, the Prime Minister's Office and Services Australia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.