{"id":918257,"date":"2026-10-06T14:22:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T14:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918257\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T14:22:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T14:22:14","slug":"openai-delivers-a-mea-culpa-to-the-australian-government-in-person-but-answers-still-elude-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918257\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI delivers a mea culpa to the Australian government in person \u2013 but answers still elude | OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open AI\u2019s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company\u2019s first in-person mea culpa after it admitted \u2013 in an unsigned email, to a public departmental inbox<\/a> \u2013 that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation and grabbed data related to Medicare.<\/p>\n

Kwon \u2013 polite, friendly, even-toned \u2013 got through a potentially dicey committee hearing unscathed, promising to do better and pledging assistance to Australia. No missteps, no viral moments, just delivering his answers helpfully, in a quiet and calm manner, sympathising with the questioner and the point they were making.<\/p>\n

In other words, just like ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Even the content of his responses evoked the AI assistant he was there to defend.<\/p>\n

\"OpenAIOpenAI admits misstep in handling AI agent interactions with Australian government sites \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Asked by Pocock \u201cwhy did you send an email to an arbitrary department email?\u201d Kwon replied: \u201cIn retrospect, we should have done what you\u2019re suggesting\u201d. Asked why Altman wasn\u2019t informed before his meeting with Marles, and why the company didn\u2019t fess up there, Kwon said: \u201cI agree the process by which people became aware of this incident inside our company could have been much better\u201d.<\/p>\n

One couldn\u2019t help but be reminded of the way the chatbot responds when pulled up on a mistake: \u201cGood catch. You\u2019re right to push back. My bad, that one\u2019s on me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Kwon\u2019s parlance, the models \u2013 built from the ground up by OpenAI<\/a>, which reportedly wants to value itself at $1.4tn \u2013 \u201caccessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.\u201d He tried to explain that the \u201cnovelty\u201d of this incident meant the company had \u201clearned our lesson\u201d, which was that it should inform victims of such incidents much earlier, rather than waiting.<\/p>\n

Kwon again apologised for the company only sending a casual email to the federal government disclosing that its agent had inappropriately accessed Medicare statistics<\/a>, but tried to explain to Tuesday\u2019s parliamentary hearing that it was sometimes \u201cdifficult\u201d to figure how to make such notifications to a big sprawling public service.<\/p>\n

Senator David Pocock<\/a> helpfully offered: \u201cI assume someone in your government relations team has mobile phone numbers of ministers and various people?\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a similar air of post-facto contrition as Kwon \u2013 OpenAI\u2019s chief strategy officer \u2013 could offer few answers<\/a> about why the company\u2019s CEO, Sam Altman, didn\u2019t inform the Australian deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, about the incident when they met face-to-face in San Francisco on 1 September. That was nine days before the company emailed Services Australia, and nearly a whole month after it first learned of the 18 June intrusion.<\/p>\n

Kwon said Altman wasn\u2019t aware of the incident before the Marles meeting. After today\u2019s committee hearing<\/a>, it\u2019s still unclear why.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a big government, and maybe Kwon is right that it\u2019s \u201cdifficult\u201d to find the right person to talk to. But some could also argue that your boss shaking hands with Australia\u2019s deputy prime minister would be something of a useful window.<\/p>\n

At least, we learned, he said the company didn\u2019t use AI to write the infamous email. Small blessings that they managed to ask a human to write the email \u2013 even if it went to an obscure inbox.<\/p>\n

But with Australia actually striving to become a tech capital for datacentres and AI \u2013 as the revolving door of big tech companies told the inquiry, from Anthropic<\/a> to Microsoft and Google \u2013 then setting the basic rules of the road for these firms, about how they must act and respond to this country and its government, is critical.<\/p>\n

Kwon said OpenAI was committed to providing future notifications \u201cvery quickly\u201d, and that there were no further incidents they were aware of. But he casually dropped in one staggering fact: OpenAI was still trawling through the activity logs for the agents involved in the Services Australia breach, with those logs totalling 50 petabytes of data.<\/p>\n

A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, or 1 million gigabytes.<\/p>\n

Kwon made the mind-boggling claim that it would take a human 66m years \u2013 never sleeping, never resting \u2013 to go through that data by hand.<\/p>\n

The team tasked with checking Services Australia\u2019s email inboxes must be hoping there aren\u2019t any more dramas lurking in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open AI\u2019s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company\u2019s first in-person…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-918257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918257","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=918257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}