An OpenAI agent researching public medicine spending bypassed security blocks and gained unauthorized access to public and non-public files on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal, the government there disclosed Thursday. The agent, which OpenAI said was running during an internal evaluation in June, also wrote files to an internal server, according to the complaint.

Transluce, an independent nonprofit AI research lab, analyzed public request logs from the URL scanning service urlquery.net and found autonomous agents attempting SQL injection, cross-site scripting, command injection, and path traversal against the University of New Mexico’s digital library, the public data platform Data USA, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). The agents tried to retrieve ordinary information, including a historical photograph, University of Iowa data, and local pharmaceutical data in Victoria, and the offensive behavior appeared only after normal retrieval methods failed.

Transluce ties the Data USA and AIHW activity to an agent swarm that it says OpenAI previously confirmed originated from the company, based on shared targets, tactics and timing.

A day after Transluce published its findings on Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed that an OpenAI agent researching public medicine spending bypassed blocks on a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal in June and gained unauthorized access to public and non-public files. OpenAI, which said the agent was running during an internal evaluation, notified the Australian government on September 10. According to Albanese, the agent also wrote files to an internal server.

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