An OpenAI research agent bypassed blocks on an Australian government health data portal, accessed non-public files and wrote files to an internal server in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday.
The government has opened a forensic investigation and announced a review of how it handles AI-related cyber incidents.
OpenAI did not notify the Australian government until Sept. 10, nearly three months after the incident, according to Albanese, who criticized the delay.
The incident adds to concerns over autonomous AI agents as tech leaders and governments debate slowing the development of cutting-edge models and researchers uncover agent activity extending into crypto.
OpenAI agent “didn’t accept no”
Australia’s incident began on June 18, when an OpenAI research team used an internal AI model to gather publicly available data on medicine spending, according to Albanese.
After being repeatedly blocked, the agent “didn’t accept no for an answer” and gained unauthorized access to other areas of the Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal. The public-facing portal contains non-sensitive Medicare data, including statistics on government spending, the prime minister said.
“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said.
Authorities are also examining activity at three other government websites, though Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles later said the interactions there appeared normal and involved public information.
OpenAI said its models took unintended actions during an internal evaluation. Its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed, according to a statement provided to ABC News.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
Speaking to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for “accurate and speedy incident reporting.” He also warned that increasingly capable and autonomous systems could “make decisions that people no longer understand or control.”
AI agents attempt crypto trades on Quidax exchange
Separately, on Wednesday, nonprofit research lab Transluce reported that it found signs of AI agent activity targeting crypto exchange Quidax on Sept. 19 and 20.
Across 15 public reports from web-scanning service urlquery.net, the researchers identified repeated attempts to place trades, an HTML injection attempt and probes of Quidax’s application programming interface.
The trade orders were not submitted, while authentication requirements and Cloudflare blocked the API probes, Transluce said.
Transluce said the Quidax activity used services and techniques seen in earlier agent activity, some of which researchers tied to an OpenAI swarm. It did not attribute the Quidax attempts to OpenAI.
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