Rogue AI hacks government system for first time – The Latest
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Who's accountable for an agent going rogue? In this case in Australia, they're considering referring it to the federal police.
Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concerns.
The idea that this is just part of the kind of natural evolution of AI and we're all going to have to roll with it as these tech companies experiment is something that the public and politicians just aren't going to accept.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hough. The whole world has been talking for some time now about AI safety. And we now know that a rogue AI agent hacked into a government system for the first time, in this case, the Australian government. Rob Booth, you're our technology editor. What do we know about what happened?
What exactly happened in the Australian Medicare hack by a rogue OpenAI agent?
Well, this is another example of AI agents kind of breaching the rules that normally govern them and hacking, essentially, into the systems of the Australian public health system in this case. So it's an open AI agent, and it was being tested and evaluated by OpenAI in San Francisco back in June. when it basically was trying to find out some health data from the Australian public kind of databases that carry
all the
health data. And it couldn't get what it needed, so it just went further and it hacked into their system in order to try and get what it wanted. And in the process, it was accessing not just the public files that were available, but also... non-public files. So it was a straightforward breach. This is called the Medicare system in Australia and is a kind of public system, government system. But also in the process of doing this, it seems that it's the agents, again, just to stress they were being tested, right? So they're not supposed to be kind of out in the world. It also kind of ended up compromising other Australian public organizations, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, apparently, and also the Victorian Department of Health.
So a whole range of things that were kind of compromised.
And that you'd imagine would have extremely, you know, strict security policies around them. So the fact that this test agent was able to access those despite those security mechanisms is just mind blowing.
Well, it's another example of the capabilities of the AI agents that are being developed. And remember, these AI agents, the ones that are being tested and evaluated at the moment, are not ones that have been released. So they're sort of by definition at the frontier of AI capabilities. And this happened in, as we said, this happened in June. OpenAI didn't find out about it themselves. Until August.
How did the rogue AI manage to breach multiple Australian health agencies?
And it's only in September that they told the Australian government about it, which has caused quite a lot of anger.
Yeah, it's caused a huge amount of anger. And obviously, Australian citizens justifiably and understandably are deeply anxious,
or
many of them are, and furious. I think the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, will also be slightly infuriated by the fact that OpenAI decided to communicate with them via a sort of generic email address, rather than sending a representative of the company from even the Australian office to speak to sort of top senior officials.
Yeah, so the sort of timeline here is that OpenAI didn't tell the Australians until the 10th of September. And when they did, they emailed this sort of almost generic email address, publicdisclosuresatservicesaustralia.com. It was the inbox. It was only checked kind of every 24 hours. So it didn't
get picked up until
the next day. What do OpenAI say about that delay? Well, they say we were validating and investigating the facts. But on the face of it, that could be at least six weeks delay from them finding out about it. Albanese has talked about it being unacceptable, the hack itself. Talked about it being of an extreme concern. And he was obviously at the UN General Assembly yesterday. And Sam Altman, the chief executive co-founder of OpenAI, was also there addressing the Security Council.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:58
2
What exactly happened in the Australian Medicare hack by a rogue OpenAI agent?
0:58–2:58
3
How did the rogue AI manage to breach multiple Australian health agencies?
2:58–5:11
4
What was the timeline from the breach in June to OpenAI’s disclosure in September?
5:11–8:43
5
How did the Australian government and Prime Minister react to the hack?
8:43–11:43
6
What explanations did OpenAI give for the delay in reporting the incident?
11:43–13:27