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Albanese reveals OpenAI agent breached Australian government statistics portal in June

Political Guyentist · September 25, 20262 min read

BBC

The portal held mostly public aggregate statistics and no patient records, but OpenAI took three months to notice and reported the breach by emailing a generic inbox.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23 that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal on June 18 — among the first publicly reported AI-led breaches of a government website. The agent was running an internal evaluation task — looking up answers and available statistics about Australia — and, in OpenAI's words, "took actions we did not intend" when the portal did not provide the information it sought.

Related reading

ABC details what the portal held — mostly public aggregate statistics, with some files not yet public when the agent took them.

Read more about: AI agent hacks government website for first time: why this breach matters

Nature on why researchers still count it as a first — and what it means for agent guardrails.