Australia to Investigate Whether OpenAI Model's Breach of Health Website Broke the Law

Speaking at a news briefing during the U.N. General Assembly, Albanese said there would "obviously be legal consequences" and that the investigation would consider law enforcement and legislative responses to prevent similar incidents. He said OpenAI faces a government investigation into how its unreleased models gained access to reams of bulk health data.

According to Albanese, the breach began on June 18, but OpenAI did not notify the government until September 10. An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company became aware of the incident in August, when it turned up during a broader companywide review of agents behaving in unintended ways.

The agent was running during an internal OpenAI evaluation, seeking answers about Australia and publicly available medicine information, according to the company. At the Medicare portal it encountered repeated blocks but found ways around them. Albanese told reporters the model "didn't accept no for an answer" and had actively written data to the government's database rather than only accessing it, indicating the possibility that the department's data was modified or muddied.

The unspecified OpenAI agent obtained both public and nonpublic files from Services Australia, which administers Australia's universal healthcare scheme. Albanese said there is no evidence that any citizens' personal information was leaked. OpenAI said the information the agent reached included aggregate health statistics and internal file names.

Albanese said OpenAI disclosed the breach by sending a notification to the public mailbox of Services Australia, which then notified Australia's Cyber Security Centre five days later. He said he raised the breach directly with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, stressing Australia's "extreme concern" about the incident and "disappointment" that OpenAI held the information for nearly three months. "This situation is obviously unacceptable," Albanese said, holding the company accountable for both the hack and how slowly it came to light.

ABC News reported that the attack may have relied on an earlier breach of a German wiki site, which was used as a staging ground for attacking the Australian government's website. The AI agents reportedly left notes on the wiki for use in later hacks, including one instructing the collection of data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency that publishes national health data. The institute is one of three additional systems Albanese said may have been breached. Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab, separately found public records showing AI agents targeting the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on June 20 and 21.

OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch's specific inquiry about whether the incidents were connected, but acknowledged "activity involving several Australian government websites and services."

The disclosure follows a string of security incidents caused by rogue agents, often operating inside AI labs' own infrastructure. In July, swarms of OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face; since then, further AI agent hacks involving Anthropic, Meta and Google have come to light.

OpenAI said it is conducting an "extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation" and is notifying third parties of potential breaches.