{"id":781800,"date":"2026-09-25T04:08:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781800\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T04:08:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:08:18","slug":"why-did-an-openai-system-hack-australias-health-system-and-can-it-be-stopped-in-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/781800\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did an OpenAI system hack Australia&#8217;s health system &#8211; and can it be stopped in the future?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Australia has said this incident is the first of its kind, and experts agree it might be.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As far as we know, hacks carried out by AI agents are still quite rare occurrences &#8211; but then again, it is largely up to companies themselves to disclose them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Hacks like this have happened before. In July, OpenAI agents went rogue during a test and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c3ek3gvdnj3o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">infiltrated tech start-up Hugging Face&#8217;s internal systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The AI agents decided that ignoring the limits on what should be done to achieve their goal was the best course of action. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">This is what the industry calls &#8220;misalignment&#8221; &#8211; broadly defined as when AI machines do not act in humanity&#8217;s best interests, such as by bending the rules.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It is a problem that is fundamental to making AI safe, and it is proving challenging. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">To put it simply, the type of AI models at play here &#8211; known as large language models &#8211; are designed to predict the likeliest output to a given input, rather than consider the consequences of that output as a human would.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Companies attempt to prevent negative consequences by placing &#8220;guardrails&#8221; on the AI but, as the Australian government found out, that is not always enough.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Dr Hammond Pearce, senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC this sort of hack would likely &#8220;grow in severity and in frequency&#8221;, adding: &#8220;I do hope that this incident does start ringing alarm bells in governments around the world.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Niusha Shafiabady, professor of computational intelligence at the Australian Catholic University, said this incident had shown the need to &#8220;judge autonomous AI by its behaviour under pressure, not by the promises in a product launch&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The deeper technical risk is that autonomous AI does not always know when it is wrong, and humans may not be able to see why it made a decision,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Without strong verification and hard boundaries, probabilistic errors can quietly become operational failures.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia has said this incident is the first of its kind, and experts agree it might be. As&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-781800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}