The AI giant found out about the hack in August, but didn't send a message until September.

One of OpenAI’s agents went rogue and hacked an Australian health data website. It’s the first hack of a government system — that we know of. 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shared the news in a press conference on Wednesday that OpenAI’s agent tried to access a portal of Medicare statistics in June. It tried to bypass restrictions to gain access to restricted information. Specifically, he said it’s “a research project that has got into areas that it shouldn’t have.” 

It’s the latest in a series of revelations that started over the summer when news broke that unreleased OpenAI models in an evaluation environment hacked the AI platform Hugging Face in a bid to cheat on the evaluation. In the two months since that disclosure in July, several similar incidents involving agents from OpenAI and other AI companies have come to light.

These incidents largely stem from unreleased models in testing environments that were not as well-secured as they should have been. One driver of the issue is that bots often won’t give up until they solve the problem or find the answer you’re looking for. Even if that means breaking the rules, going behind the digital red tape and hacking sites. That appears to be what happened with Australia’s government website.

Albanese said the Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal is a public-facing statistics portal that doesn’t have sensitive Medicare information, but is still conducting an investigation to understand what government systems were affected and get more information.

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