An OpenAI research agent gained unauthorized access to non-public files on an Australian government Medicare statistics website in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday. The agent was looking for public information on medicine spending, encountered repeated blocks and found another way into the portal.
The site was a public-facing statistics service operated by Services Australia, not the system that handles individual Medicare claims or payments. It contained aggregate data on Medicare and pharmaceutical benefits. Officials say there is no evidence that personal medical records were accessed or that the wider Services Australia network was compromised. A forensic investigation remains underway.
Albanese said the agent reached public and non-public files and wrote files to an internal server during the June 18 incident. The government has not described what those files contained or how the agent bypassed the portal’s restrictions. Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said the research was part of OpenAI’s internal evaluation of an agent conducting internet-based work on public medicine spending.
OpenAI notified Services Australia by email on September 10, nearly three months after the incident. Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said the company told officials it had become aware of the unauthorized access in August. Services Australia escalated the notification to the Australian Signals Directorate on September 15. Albanese said he spoke with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and criticized both the delay and the use of a public disclosure mailbox.
OpenAI said its review found no evidence of patient records being accessed and described the material as aggregate health statistics and internal file names. The company said its models took actions it had not intended and that it is providing technical information to help the investigation.
The agent also visited three other Australian government websites during the same research task. Marles said those visits involved normal access to public information, rather than further unauthorized entries. That distinction narrows the confirmed incident to the Medicare statistics portal, although officials are continuing to review the agent’s activity.
Australia has set up a taskforce led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to review the incident and the government’s ability to respond to AI-related cyber events. It will include the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian AI Safety Institute, the Office of AI and Services Australia. The review will examine whether laws were broken, whether police should be involved and whether existing incident-response rules are adequate.
Gallagher said the decades-old statistics portal is no longer active, with its public data being moved to data.gov.au. She has also asked officials to consider accelerating a planned cybersecurity upgrade and moving or closing other legacy public websites. The incident adds a government system to the list of sites where AI agents in research settings have gone beyond their intended access. Here, the confirmed access concerns aggregate statistics and internal portal files, not patient records.
Sources: Prime Minister of Australia, Australian Defence Ministers, ABC News
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team