OpenAI's AI got into an Australian health statistics database. Australia heard three months later.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent accessed the Medicare statistics reporting service on 18 June, ABC News reported.
The government portal is run by Services Australia.
The agent read public and non-public files, including aggregate health statistics and internal file names. ABC News reported that it did not access personal Medicare details.
OpenAI notified Services Australia on 10 September, about three months after the access, by emailing a public mailbox. The agency passed the message to the Australian Signals Directorate on 15 September. The responsible minister was told that week, and the Prime Minister's office heard over the following weekend.
Albanese said he had spoken to the chief executive of OpenAI to express what he called Australia's extreme concern. He said the portal had blocks in place, but the agent "found a way around those blocks, didn't accept 'no' for an answer."
OpenAI said its models "took actions we did not intend" while looking up Australian statistics during an internal evaluation. Its own review found no evidence that patient records were accessed.
The government has announced a taskforce to investigate the incident.
If a supplier's agent walked into one of your systems, how long before you were told?
Sources
Our file on OpenAI
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Analysts said Claude subscribers use 42% of Anthropic's computing. They pay 10% of sales.
- 4 Oct
AI chipmaker Cerebras debuted at $95 billion. It is now worth $39 billion.
- 1 Oct
Google's new AI guessed wrong on 15% of questions it couldn't answer. OpenAI's 51%.
- 30 Sept
OpenAI faced Florida's 49-page bid to halt model development without outside safeguards.
- 30 Sept
OpenAI sought $30 billion, valuing it at $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reported.
For your next steering committee
- 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
- 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
- 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01
