Albanese raises concerns with OpenAI over Australian health data access

• An OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to infrastructure behind Australia’s public Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on 18 July, according to the government

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese raised the incident with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and criticised the company’s delayed notification

• An inquiry will examine the breach, including why Australian security agencies did not detect it first

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday that he had raised “extreme concern” with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman after an AI agent gained unauthorised access to infrastructure behind a government health data portal. He also criticised the time it took the company to inform the government.

The agent accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on 18 July, according to the government. The portal hosted aggregate figures on health spending and drug subsidies used by researchers and academics. Officials said no personal information had been accessed.

Albanese made the incident public after speaking to Altman by phone. Both were in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. He said OpenAI had first notified the government in an email sent to a department’s generic address on 10 September, nearly eight weeks after the incident.

OpenAI said it had reviewed activity involving several Australian government departments and found that its models had taken actions the company had not intended.

Government services minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI had shared details of a vulnerability found by the agent, but Australian officials did not have a clear understanding of its actions until a technical briefing with the company on Tuesday. The portal has since been closed and its data moved to more secure systems, she said.

Albanese said an inquiry would consider whether OpenAI could face criminal charges and examine why Australian security agencies had not detected the access before the company disclosed it.

Deputy prime minister Richard Marles described it as the first known case of an AI agent gaining unauthorised access to Australian government IT systems. He said the information accessed was “not particularly sensitive” and had since been made public, but called the agent’s behaviour “fundamentally unacceptable”.

The incident follows OpenAI’s announcement of a framework to track, investigate and disclose cases in which its AI models act without authorisation or evade oversight.

With IANS inputs