Australia launched an urgent government review on Thursday, September 24, after disclosing that an OpenAI artificial intelligence agent gained unauthorized access to a Medicare statistics website in June. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese raised the incident with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, while acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said a new task force would examine the intrusion and broader risks from autonomous AI systems.
The agent was carrying out an internal OpenAI evaluation on June 18, seeking publicly available figures on medicine spending, according to Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher. It reached infrastructure behind Services Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal and accessed public and non-public material. The standalone portal held aggregate Medicare and pharmaceutical statistics; it was separate from systems handling claims, payments and individual records. Officials said they had found no evidence that personal medical information was accessed.
Marles said the model interacted with four Australian public websites. Its visits to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria's health department and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research involved ordinary access to public information. At the Medicare statistics portal, however, the agent continued after a request for information was denied and found a way around access controls. Investigators have yet to establish the full technical sequence.
OpenAI told officials it discovered the incident in August and notified Services Australia on September 10, nearly three months after the June access. Services Australia referred the matter to the Australian Signals Directorate on September 15 and held its first technical exchange with OpenAI on September 22. Albanese criticized the delay in notification and said he had discussed it directly with Altman. Australian officials said OpenAI was cooperating with the current investigation.
The task force, led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, will include cyber and AI agencies and review the incident, government network defenses and the legal arrangements for AI-related intrusions. Services Australia is conducting a separate forensic investigation. Gallagher said the legacy statistics portal is no longer active and its public data is being moved to data.gov.au; she has also asked whether planned cybersecurity upgrades can be accelerated.
Marles described the immediate impact as limited but the unauthorized entry as serious. The government has not announced a final finding about how the agent crossed the portal's defenses or whether any law was broken. Further technical meetings with OpenAI and the forensic report will determine the next steps, as officials assess how to detect and respond when an AI agent acts beyond its assigned research task.
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