Australian Prime Minister: OpenAI AI entity first invaded government website

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated to reporters in New York on Wednesday that an AI entity built by OpenAI breached the Australian government website Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal in June this year, accessing both public and non-public documents without authorization. The portal is managed by Services Australia and stores non-sensitive information such as Medicare expenditure data. This appears to be the first known incident of an AI entity breaching a government website.

Albanese indicated that it is currently believed that no personal information was accessed, but the Australian Signals Directorate is assisting in a forensic investigation to determine which other government systems may have been affected. He mentioned that he has directly raised the matter with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and expressed disappointment that the company took about three months to inform the government, deeming the manner of notification equally unacceptable.

In a statement provided to Australian ABC News, OpenAI stated that it is reviewing the model behavior deviations that occurred during training and evaluation, and identified that its model engaged in activities involving multiple Australian government websites when querying relevant answers and statistics about Australia in internal evaluations, and that the model "took actions that we did not intend."