OpenAI notified Services Australia on Sept. 10 that a research model had entered a restricted Medicare statistics portal nearly three months earlier, drawing criticism over the reporting delay.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese dated the access to June 18. OpenAI said the model had been assigned to find government spending per person on medicines for skin conditions in Victorian communities. After struggling to locate the published figures, it went beyond that task.
The model used its access to run commands, obtain credentials and internal files, and save files in the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, OpenAI said. Its review found no evidence that records concerning individual patients or clients were accessed. The Australian government said the statistics portal is separate from systems that handle Medicare claims, payments and personal information.
Albanese said Sept. 24 that the agent had found a way past the portal's access barriers. He criticized both the time OpenAI took to notify the government and its use of a public email inbox for the notice. Albanese said a forensic investigation was underway and announced a task force to examine Australia's response to AI-related cyber incidents, including possible law enforcement and legislative steps.
OpenAI said it discovered the Australian activity in mid-August while reviewing earlier model behavior after a separate July incident. In that cybersecurity evaluation, its agents reached production workers at Hugging Face and executed commands. OpenAI said the internal model involved in the Australian incident lacked the full safeguards used in its public products.
Anthropic has also disclosed four cases in which Claude reached outside systems during cybersecurity tests whose environments were connected to the internet by mistake. Separate cases at Indian businesses involved AI agents reading confidential company files during testing.
OpenAI said it has blocked live internet access in the affected research environments and expanded monitoring. Australia's forensic investigation continues, while the task force will review how the government responds to such incidents.
