OpenAI agents hacked into an Australian Medicare data portal, according to reports, and officials are furious that it took months for the company to disclose the incident.
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI agent breached a Medicare statistics website back in June, but the government wasn't alerted to the activity by the AI developer until 10 September.
Albanese said he'd shared "Australia's extreme concern about this incident" to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
"I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the Government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable," he said.
Notably, Albanese hit out at the “unacceptable” manner of disclosure by the company. OpenAI notified authorities via an email sent to a public-facing disclosures mailbox, rather than by directly contacting the government.
In response, the government is setting up a taskforce to investigate the incident, conduct a review into AI-related cyber incidents, and consider whether a criminal offence may have occurred.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said: "We notified the organizations and are providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities."
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What happened in the OpenAI Medicare breach?
The infiltration happened in June, and OpenAI told the Australian government it had spotted the activity in August. OpenAI attributed the gap between discovery and notification to "validating and investigating the facts".
The agent in question had been tasked with finding information online about public medicine spending as part of an internal test.
The data accessed did not include individual private or financial data, as the portal in question doesn't include such information. However, non-public facing data including aggregate statistics and internal file names were viewed.
An OpenAI spokesperson said it had been looking for misaligned model activity when it spotted the incident.
"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," the company said. "In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend."
Could OpenAI face criminal charges?
Deputy prime minister Richard Marles told reporters that the Medicare incident was "utterly unacceptable", adding that a task force will examine whether the law has been broken, as it "definitely does raise questions about whether the law has been broken in respect of this."
PM Albanese also said that part of the investigation will consider whether the incident needs to be referred to local police.
In Australia, computer intrusions are prohibited by its cyber crime law, as is the creation and distribution of malicious software. The task force will also look into "whether or not the legal regime we have in place is fit for purpose in a world where we have an emerging AI capability."
Concerns mount over ‘rogue AI agents’
The admission by OpenAI marks the latest in a string of apparent ‘rogue AI’ incidents involving the company and counterparts in the industry.
In July, the company admitted that agents had breached a Hugging Face production environment after breaking out of a sandbox test environment.
Just last week, OpenAI revealed six other instances of misaligned behavior by AI agents.
Andrew Kay, director of systems engineering APJ at Illumio, said there will likely be “more high-profile breaches like this” unless robust guardrails are implemented to prevent agents ‘going rogue’.
“As increasingly autonomous and capable agents emerge, we cannot rely on the illusion of guardrails or assume an AI will always behave as intended,” he said. “It will take whatever action is necessary to achieve the task it has been set.”
“Rogue or misbehaving AI agents will only become more competent and more prevalent,” Kay added. “The priority must be ensuring that if one breaches a boundary, it cannot access sensitive material, cause serious damage or bring essential services to a standstill.”
Laura Ellis, senior vice president for artificial intelligence at Arctic Wolf, said the incident is a “timely example of a cyber risk businesses need to be preparing for now”.
“While the details of this incident are still being investigated, the security lesson is clear and security fundamentals remain unchanged,” she said. “All organizations deploying AI agents should secure them at least as tightly as any other identity: strict permissions, clear guardrails, continuous monitoring, and the ability to act fast when an agent steps outside its intended bounds.”
Ellis added that safeguards are “only part of the equation”, however. Disclosure of an incident within a “responsible timeline and with appropriate transparency” is vital.