Australia has ordered an “urgent and immediate review” after saying an OpenAI agent discovered a way around blocks on its Medicare statistics portal, BBC News reported. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the announcement at the UN General Assembly in New York, referring to a hack that happened in June. OpenAI became aware of the hack in August but did not report it to the government agency’s public inbox until September.

The report says it is “believed to be the first known breach of a government system by rogue AI agents.” Albanese stated it took OpenAI “way too long to inform the government,” and OpenAI said “our models took actions we did not intend.”

The breached portal, Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, run by Services Australia, is a public-facing site that contains “non-sensitive Medicare information,” Albanese said. He said OpenAI’s research team used an internal model to research public medicine spending and that the agent hit and sidestepped repeated blocks, eventually reaching “both public and non-public files.” Services Australia has also stated that the agent wrote files to an internal server, according to the PM, but that claim remains under investigation.

OpenAI described the work as an “internal evaluation” with accessed material including “aggregate health statistics and internal file names” but said it found no evidence of patient records being accessed. It is also “providing technical information” to support the investigations.

OpenAI’s agent reportedly first accessed the portal on June 18. The company became aware of this during a review in August.

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