How OpenAI exposed our cyber security gaps
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The Australian government is grappling with how to safeguard sensitive data after Revelations an AI agent, controlled by OpenAI, accessed private Medicare statistics. It took months for the breach to be identified and alerted to the highest levels of government. It was a startling example of AI going rogue as the world grapples with controlling the rapid growth of AI. Today, national security and AI policy expert Olivia Shen on whether governments can keep up with the accelerating advance of AI. I'm Melissa Clark on Gadigaland in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Olivia Anthony Albanese has revealed that one of OpenAI's agents breached the Medicare portal system, a a pretty extraordinary event.
This situation is obviously unacceptable. And today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, SEM Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident.
Tell me what we know about this incident so far.
It appears that what's happened is that OpenAI was training one of its latest AI models, and to help improve the performance of the model, it instructed this AI agent to go and find information from publicly available Australian government websites, including Medicare, the Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing, and others. Now, what this agent then did was instead of just looking at the publicly available information, it tried to dive into restricted aspects of the system. So it looks like what it did was entered the Medicare statistics portal, but accessed files and aggregate data that it should not have had access to if it was just browsing the web. I think it's important to recognize though, this is not a hack in the
Sense that OpenAI didn't intend to hack this website. But it does very much demonstrate what's called AI misalignment. It's when an agent is instructed to accomplish a task and it will find its own way to try to do that. But in the course of doing so, it may do things that were not intended, like breach access files and parts of the website that were never meant to be made open to the public.
It's interesting. We've heard the Acting Prime Minister Richard Miles describe this as a a very serious incident, but one with a a minor impact.
We are talking about aggregated medical it statistics. No individuals med no individuals' medical data was accessed here.
Do you think that's a a fair characterization of this incident?
That's probably quite fair. It is very serious that agents, particularly these highly capable agents run by Frontier Labs, are doing things that they're not supposed to. If we're going to expect these Frontier Labs to be in control of their AIs, this is clearly an example where, despite the best of intentions, they haven't been able to control this AI agent from doing something it wasn't supposed to. On this occasion, we've been quite lucky. It seems that no patient data or private information was accessed. But the fact that these agents can accomplish this without much oversight, you know, without OpenAI even find finding out about it until they went back to their logs about a month later, this is quite a core horse of concern.
We've learned that this actually happened back in June, and it's taken quite a bit of time for the information to get to the highest level of government. What do you make of some of the delays in notifying from the original misaligned behavior, as we're calling it, to people in charge knowing about it.
Yeah, the timeline here is quite interesting.
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