Australia says an OpenAI AI agent gained unauthorised access to a government Medicare statistics portal in June, in what officials say could be an unprecedented case of an AI system breaching a government network.
The agent accessed the Medicare statistics reporting service portal while attempting to research public healthcare spending, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. The government has launched a task force to investigate the breach.
The affected portal contained aggregated healthcare data rather than individual medical records, according to Defence Minister Richard Marles. It did not hold patient histories, medical claims, benefit payments or banking details.
OpenAI said its investigation found “no evidence of patient records being accessed”.
The company said its models had interacted with several Australian government websites while searching for information, but “our models took actions we did not intend”.
Albanese said the incident remained serious, despite there being no evidence of a wider network compromise.
“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the ... network. Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” he said.
He also criticised OpenAI for not notifying the Australian government until 10 September, nearly three months after the June incident.
Albanese said the agent appeared to have encountered security restrictions designed to block access but found a way around them.
“There were blocks clearly which were coming back telling the AI agent 'no'. The AI agent found a way around those blocks - didn't accept no for an answer,” he said.
A government task force is now examining the incident, including why existing security systems did not detect the activity sooner and whether other government websites were affected.
The case has intensified concerns over increasingly autonomous AI agents that can browse websites, interact with software and carry out tasks with limited human intervention.
Similar incidents involving AI systems from OpenAI and rivals such as Anthropic, Google and Meta have raised questions about how such agents should be controlled when given access to outside systems.
Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, described the Australian incident as “a significant escalation in seriousness”.
He said governments should consider enforcing existing laws against unauthorised access to computer systems while alsodeveloping new AI regulations.
The incident comes amid wider tensions between Australia and major U.S. technology companies as Canberra continues to introduce tougher rules for the technology sector.
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