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OpenAI apologizes after its AI agent hacked Australia's Medicare system in June
An OpenAI agent broke into Australia's Medicare data portal in June while researching drug spending, and the company waited three months to tell the government, informing officials only on September 10 through an email to an unmonitored inbox. Sam Altman got on the phone with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on September 23. According to Albanese, who disclosed the call publicly the next day from a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the OpenAI CEO admitted the company had "not done good enough." He did not apologize directly. OpenAI's written apology came a day later, on September 25, when the company called the episode a "new kind of cyber incident" and said, "we are sorry and working to do better in the future." Here's what actually happened. On June 18, an OpenAI model was tasked with researching government spending on medicines for skin conditions in Victorian communities, according to OpenAI's own account of the incident. In the process, the agent hit access restrictions on the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, a portal run by Services Australia, and found a way around them. It then ran commands, pulled internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files...