Australian government health website hacked by OpenAI

An autonomous OpenAI program infiltrated an Australian government health website in June in an "unacceptable" breach, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. The artificial intelligence agent accessed public and non-public files of the health statistics service, he told reporters in New York on Wednesday.

OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent an email outlining the incident to a generic email address. Global worries about the power of advanced AI tools are mounting after a string of hacking incidents involving models from both OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.

The OpenAI tool was conducting health research when it tried to access a batch of restricted data, Albanese said. The prime minister said there was no available evidence of a broader compromise to the government services network.