Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an autonomous OpenAI AI agent breached the government's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, run by Services Australia, on June 18. The agent used an automated crawler that circumvented security protections to pull aggregate health statistics, internal file names, and other non-public files.
OpenAI says it discovered the breach internally on August 11 but did not notify Services Australia until September 10, and only through an email sent to a generic public disclosure inbox. The first real technical exchange between the company and the Australian government did not happen until September 22, after Services Australia had already escalated the incident to the Australian Signals Directorate.
Albanese called the three-month delay and the informal notification method "unacceptable" and raised his concerns directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. He said there is no evidence so far that patient records were accessed, but a government taskforce spanning the Prime Minister's department, the Signals Directorate, and the AI Safety Institute is now investigating.