Australian government reveals data hack by AI agents

Australia’s Prime Minister has revealed that a government portal has been infiltrated by artificial intelligence agents from the US firm OpenAI.

OpenAI have reported that the incident occurred while AI agents were tasked with researching health statistics. The bots accessed data from “several Australia government websites and services”, including information that was not publicly available. The data breach happened back in June, and OpenAI only became aware of it in August. They notified the Australian Government using a general email address on 10 September.

This revelation comes after a series of incidents where AI agents have seemingly ‘gone rogue’ and acted beyond their expected parameters. This is the first time, however, that AI agents have been confirmed to have accessed private government data from another country. The Australian Government has since revealed that other systems, such as Crime Statistics and the Department of Health, may also have been accessed.

OpenAI said that they discovered the incident during a review of ‘misaligned model activity’. Their statement reported that, during the review, “we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.“

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed the hack while in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. “This situation is obviously unacceptable,” he said, adding: “I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident, and I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”

Richard Marles, who is acting Prime Minister while Albanese is in the US, reassured people that sensitive data is secure. He said: “We keep our most important national security information behind a fortress” adding that this data was, in contrast, behind a “fence”. “The AI agent climbed the fence,” Marles said, “And the point is, it was unintended, it wasn't asked to.”