Australia’s acting PM and government services minister brief on the OpenAI incident
Acting Prime Minister Marles said an OpenAI model interacted with four Australian public websites in June and that only its entry into the Medicare statistics portal was unauthorized; Government Services Minister Gallagher said the portal is no longer active and its data is moving to data.gov.au.
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- Press Conference, Sydney
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This is a spoken press-conference transcript that complements the Prime Minister’s remarks in New York the same day. Marles said the other three sites (the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria’s health department and NSW’s crime statistics bureau) saw entirely normal interactions, that the portal holds only aggregated statistics with no individual medical data, and that the system was not compromised; relaying OpenAI, he said it became aware in August and first notified Services Australia on September 10. The two ministers describe the task differently: Marles says the model was “undergoing training,” Gallagher that it was an internet research task in OpenAI’s internal capability evaluation. Marles called it “a very serious incident” and “utterly unacceptable” while saying its impact was relatively minor; he called OpenAI very cooperative in the current engagement, and Gallagher called it very transparent. There is still no first-party OpenAI statement, and Services Australia’s forensic investigation continues.
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- Australian PM discloses an OpenAI model’s unauthorized access to a Medicare statistics portal → · Prime Minister of Australia
- Australia’s PM&C opens a rapid review of an AI-driven cyber incident → · Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (Australia)