An OpenAI agent infiltrated the Australian Medicare statistics portal, accessing public and non-public files, with no evidence that personal data was compromised

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that an OpenAI artificial intelligence agent accessed, without authorization, in June, the government portal that centralizes statistics on Medicare spending.

The agent accessed both public files and some non-public ones, but there are no indications that personal information was accessed.

The Australian Signals Directorate is leading the investigation and checking whether other websites were also compromised. OpenAI said it discovered the incident in August and informed the government on September 10.

The company said the models were searching for information for an internal evaluation, but took unintended actions.

Albanese announced several measures in response to the breach: creating a team to investigate the incident, referring the matter to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on AI, and considering whether to refer it to the Australian Federal Police.