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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaking in New York.\u00a0Nine<\/p>\n
\u201cNo personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,\u201d Albanese said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albanese said he had spoken to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to discuss the \u201cunacceptable\u201d incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cI also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albanese said the agent accessed both public and non-public files.<\/p>\n
An ongoing forensic investigation is seeking to establish whether any other government services were affected.<\/p>\n
In a statement, OpenAI acknowledged the incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we\u2019ve shared publicly, OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation and notifying third parties when our review identifies potential impacts to their systems,\u201d a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring this 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI said there was \u201cno evidence\u201d of patient records being accessed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe notified the organisations and are providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed that the AI agent had interacted with four government agency websites, including two federal sites, the Victoria Health Department, and a \u201cNSW statistics site\u201d.<\/p>\n
9News understands the NSW site was the Bureau of Crime and Statistics and the second federal site was the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.<\/p>\n
However, Marles said the agent only gained unauthorised access to the Medicare statistics portal.<\/p>\n
He confirmed the government had first been made aware of the incident \u201ca couple of weeks ago\u201d, with ministers only being told at the end of last week and over the weekend.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was important to us in making the announcement overnight and today, to be able to reassure the public that while this is a very serious incident, the actual impact of unauthorised access is relatively minor, and that is an important point to reassure,\u201d he said of the delay in making the information public.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s taken us a couple of days to get the best information that we can in relation to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.\u00a0Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Albanese also announced the establishment of a special task force to review the incident.<\/p>\n
The task force will also determine whether existing security processes are appropriate for responding to AI-related incidents.<\/p>\n
Marles said OpenAI was being \u201cvery cooperative\u201d with the government on its response.<\/p>\n
AI has been in the spotlight as an issue at the general assembly of the United Nations, and Albanese is due to address the gathered leaders and delegates in New York this morning.<\/p>\n
Tech company leaders including Altman, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face co-founder Cl\u00e9ment Delangue, told the UN Security Council overnight that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could lose control of the future to AI,\u201d Altman told the council.<\/p>\n