OpenAI agent hacked Australian health portal, government says

On June 18, an AI agent from OpenAI gained access to data it should not have had on a portal run by the Australian agency Services Australia. The portal contains statistics on Medicare, Australia's public health insurance.

An AI agent is an AI program that can carry out tasks on the web on its own, for example searching for information or filling out forms, without a human steering every step. In this case, OpenAI had given the agent an ordinary research task: to collect public figures on medicine spending in Australia.

According to OpenAI, the agent was rejected by the portal several times but eventually found a way around and retrieved information that was not publicly available. The company says no evidence has been found that patient records or sensitive personal information such as ID-number-like data, benefits or bank details were accessed. According to the authorities, the portal only contains aggregated, anonymized health data and not individuals' records.

The most debated point, however, is how much time passed before anyone discovered it. OpenAI did not notify the Australian authorities until September 10, almost three months after the episode, and it did so via an ordinary email to a public mailbox.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called the process "unacceptable" and has asked his own department for a quick and thorough review of the case together with Australia's cybersecurity agency (Australian Signals Directorate) and the country's AI Safety Institute. The government is also investigating whether three more health-related websites may have been affected and whether OpenAI may face sanctions.

The case is interesting because it may be one of the first known instances of an AI agent breaking into a public authority's website on its own. It thus raises questions about how well both AI companies and public authorities are equipped to detect and stop this kind of thing as AI systems are increasingly allowed to act independently on the web.