‘Extreme concern’ as OpenAI’s ‘rogue agent’ breached Australian govt health database

Brisbane, Australia — An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian national healthcare database in the first known case of AI hacking a government network, the country’s prime minister said Wednesday. “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files” of the country’s Medicare statistics database, and even wrote files into it, Anthony Albanese told reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. The disclosure is the latest example of AI agents going rogue and acting in ways beyond what their human handlers intended, and follows calls from top AI industry figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to slow down the pace of AI development.

Albanese said he expressed Australia’s “extreme concern” to Altman in a phone call on Wednesday. Canberra wasn’t aware of a precedent for an AI breach of a government system, he added. In another development, AI research lab Transluce said Wednesday that it had detecting AI agents going rogue on several occasions going back to at least March –– predating previously known hacking incidents.

The targets included a University of New Mexico library and the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, though none of the attempts were successful. The health database hack The Australian health database hack occurred when an OpenAI agent conducting research into healthcare spending circumvented blocks to find answers in areas it had no authority to access, Albanese said. “A forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is now underway to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected,” he said.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the incident occurred in June but that the company was only made aware of it in August as they conducted extensive checks into its AI models’ activity. “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. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” Pusateri said.

Albanese said three other government systems may have been impacted, including the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the Victorian Department of Health. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent developed by US tech giant OpenAI breached an Australian government health statistics system during an internal evaluation, accessing both public and non-public files and writing files into the system, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday. According to CNN, the incident is believed to be the first publicly disclosed case of an AI agent breaching an Australian government network and comes amid growing concern over the ability of increasingly autonomous AI systems to circumvent safeguards and undertake actions beyond those intended by their human operators.

Albanese said the AI agent had accessed an Australian Medicare statistics database and bypassed restrictions after failing to obtain information through normal channels. He said there was no evidence that patients’ personal medical information had been accessed. “Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese told reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.