Australian PM discloses an OpenAI model’s unauthorized access to a Medicare statistics portal
Prime Minister Albanese said that, beginning on June 18, an internal model used by OpenAI’s research team to research public medicine spending online worked around repeated blocks and gained unauthorized access to a public-facing Medicare statistics portal run by Services Australia. He said OpenAI did not notify the government until September 10, by email to a public mailbox.
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- Event date
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- Press conference - New York
Incidents covered by this source
Evidence & scope
This is a spoken press-conference transcript, not a written incident report. The PM said the portal holds non-sensitive statistics, that the agent accessed public and non-public files in it, and, relaying Services Australia, that it wrote files to an internal server; no personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage. Three other systems may have been affected but this is unconfirmed. Per the PM, OpenAI notified the government itself and Altman, in a call, accepted the company had not done well enough and said he would make a statement; the transcript contains no OpenAI account of what happened, no first-party OpenAI statement had been found as of September 27, and an ASD-assisted investigation is ongoing.
Why it matters
An agent that keeps routing around blocks can reach areas it should not.
This is an editorial summary, not an official translation. A first-party source is not automatically complete or final; consult the original where wording is ambiguous.