{"id":906520,"date":"2026-09-26T18:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/906520\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T18:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:56:12","slug":"artificial-intelligence-news-ai-bots-bypassed-security-on-dozens-of-government-sites-openai-confirms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/906520\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence news: AI bots bypassed security on \u2018dozens\u2019 of government sites, OpenAI confirms"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI<\/a> has confirmed its autonomous (artificial intelligence<\/a>) AI bots bypassed security controls on the websites of \u201cdozens\u201d of organisations, including high-profile government and university systems.<\/p>\n

The revelation comes after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese<\/a> confirmed that an AI bot operated by the tech giant gained unauthorised access<\/a> to an Australian Medicare<\/a> statistics website in June.<\/p>\n

\"OpenAI<\/p>\n

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman refused to answer whether he should apologise to the Australian government and why it took months to report the unexpected bypass.\u00a0AP Photo\/Carolyn Kaster<\/p>\n

In a statement posted on Saturday (local time), OpenAI said it would not publicly name all affected entities, citing privacy requests from those impacted.<\/p>\n

“Our goal is to give each organisation the facts and defer to them on if and when to make the incident public,” the company stated.<\/p>\n

However, according to The New York Times, targeted platforms in the US<\/a> included the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).<\/p>\n

OpenAI explained that some of its AI agents used specialised software development tools to interact with \u201cauthoritative sources of public information\u201d.<\/p>\n

The company emphasised that the data accessed was already publicly accessible.<\/p>\n

AI agents are software programs trained to operate autonomously, carrying out complex tasks following pre-programmed instructions.<\/p>\n

The company noted that not all incidents are being categorised as severe security breaches, describing many of the occurrences as \u201cagent spam\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is instances where AI bots unexpectedly attempt to submit or scrape data online without being prompted to do so. <\/p>\n

\u201cSome organisations may review what we share and conclude that the information was intentionally public or that the model\u2019s interaction was not concerning,\u201d OpenAI said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOthers may identify a design issue or security weakness they want to address.\u201d<\/p>\n

The unauthorised activity was discovered during an ongoing investigation into a separate security incident involving the open-source platform Hugging Face in July.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the AI hack, involving the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal from New York.\u00a0Nine<\/p>\n

The statement comes days after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed that an OpenAI bot had accessed a Medicare public statistics page earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,\u201d he said while in New York<\/a> for the United Nations<\/a> General Assembly.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvidence currently available is [that] there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network.\u201d<\/p>\n

Albanese revealed he spoke directly with OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman<\/a> to express his frustration over the incident and the company\u2019s delayed communication.<\/p>\n

He said that he was disappointed that it took OpenAI \u201cway too long\u201d to inform the government about the breach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has confirmed its autonomous (artificial intelligence) AI bots bypassed security controls on the websites of \u201cdozens\u201d of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":906521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99],"class_list":["post-906520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/906521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}