Australia news live: Anthony Albanese says OpenAI agent hacked Medicare

Anthony Albanese has revealed an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare in June.

The prime minister made the comments at the UN summit in New York.

This incident occurred in June this year and involved an Open AI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.

The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files.

A forensic investigation, aided by the Australian Signals Directorate, is now under way to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected.

The Medicare statistics reporting portal is a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics, such as spending.

No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage but investigations are ongoing.

Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network.

Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.

Today, I spoke with the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident.

And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred.