OpenAI agent breached Australia’s Medicare portal – and nobody noticed for three months
Brief
An autonomous AI agent built by OpenAI gained unauthorised access to non-public files on an Australian government Medicare portal in June, but Canberra was only told about it in September, in what is being described as the first known case of an AI agent hacking a government system.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking in New York yesterday, said the agent got into the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, administered by Services Australia, on 18 June while researching government spending on healthcare. The portal repeatedly refused the agent’s requests, but it found a way around the blocks and reached both public and non-public files.
The agent also wrote files to an internal server, which is still being investigated.