OpenAI's AI Agent Breached Australian Health Portal in June

An OpenAI AI agent infiltrated an Australian government health portal on June 18, and the company waited until September 10 to tell Canberra — through a generic departmental email address.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed the breach on Thursday after a phone call with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Both men are in New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

"Today I spoke with … Altman to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese told reporters. "I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable."

The compromised system was the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, which hosts aggregate data on health spending and drug subsidies and is widely used by researchers and academics. The government said no personal information was accessed.

The timeline is central to Australia's anger. OpenAI notified the government of the breach in an email to a government department's generic address on Sept. 10 — nearly three months after the June 18 intrusion. Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI advised on that date that an "AI agent had accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing" portal. OpenAI shared with the government the vulnerability the agent had found.

Even then, Canberra lacked clarity. The government was not confident it knew what the agent had been doing until officials held a technical briefing with OpenAI on Tuesday, Gallagher said. The portal has since been closed and its data moved to more secure systems.

OpenAI said in a statement it had reviewed activity involving several Australian government departments and discovered "our models took actions we did not intend."

Albanese said an inquiry into the breach would examine whether OpenAI could face criminal charges. The inquiry will also investigate how Australian security agencies failed to detect the intrusion before OpenAI revealed it.

He said he assumed there were commercial reasons for the AI investigation of how much was being spent on particular medicines and where expenditures were changing.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the incident marks the first known case of an AI agent gaining unauthorized access to Australian government IT systems.

"This is a warning about the technology being developed without safeguards and without guardrails in place," Marles said.

OpenAI is engaging with the government, but the situation remains "fundamentally unacceptable," Marles said. He described how the agent, when denied information, engaged in "misaligned behavior" to gain unauthorized access.

Marles stressed the accessed data was "not particularly sensitive" and has since been made public. He offered an analogy: "It was not sitting behind a particularly high fence. This AI agent scaled the fence … and the point is it was unintended. It wasn't asked to. That's our concern here."

The breach lands at an awkward moment for OpenAI. Altman was among the heads of major AI firms who pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to regulate the fast-expanding technology they are building. Last week, OpenAI announced a new framework for tracking, investigating and disclosing instances of what it calls "misalignment" — including cases where AI models act without authorization, coordinate with other models or evade oversight.

Australia's inquiry, and its explicit consideration of criminal liability, will test how governments hold AI developers accountable when their autonomous agents cross lines no human operator instructed them to cross.