Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has disclosed that an artificial intelligence agent developed by US firm OpenAI hacked a government portal according t BBC.
It is believed to be one of the world’s first publicly reported AI-led hacks of a government website – and comes as world leaders and AI firms themselves call for urgent regulation amid fears the industry’s development is speeding out of control.
Albanese says breach ‘unacceptable’
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been at the UN General Assembly this week, and revealed the incident while in New York.
“This situation is obviously unacceptable,” he said.
“And today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident, and 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.”
The prime minister didn’t say whether he had raised the incident in a meeting last night with US President Donald Trump, who has been resisting calls to slow down AI development.
OpenAI says incident part of an ongoing review
In a statement, OpenAI says the breach was identified during an “extensive review” of “misaligned model activity”.
“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. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”
It said it had found no record of patient data being accessed, but had notified the organisations and that the firm is “providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities”.
“Our overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.”