The technical details are in the article. "material that was not intended for public access" was available on "the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal". In other words, they put sensitive data in the open, and somebody looked. It seems obnoxiously apparent that everything else about the framing ("OpenAI agent", "breach") is driven by politics.
The article has been edited significantly - effectively rewritten - since I commented (see archive linked from a comment). So, yes, the new version may provide more details and tell a very different story.
Honestly it's very likely something stupidly simple.
"What is the rate of health incident $X in $Y to the $Z degree". The bot went around playing mad libs with XYZ and found that the public AU data wasn't sufficient to get the answer the grader wanted so started kicking down doors.
I saw someone explain it like "A group of masked men rush a nuclear facility, breach security successfully, then count how many buttons are on each control panel on average". Like using a godhammer to destroy a mouse, their motivations and capabilities just fall in a completely different alignment to humans.
when considering the USA stance regarding anti-ai sentiment (eg. article currently on HN front page, "feds think ai critics are foreign interference"), I wonder what the consequences would be for australia, if the country decided to enact an actual reprimand.
This feels like a very credible opening to a modern-day Terminator reboot. Sometime over the Christmas-NYE week we will learning that NYSE and other exchanges have been compromised, as well as all public-facing utilities...
The difference is that financial exchanges are already attacked every second and spend orders of magnitude more on security than random government websites.
2. Things on the internet are horrifically insecure and we can no longer afford for that to be the case.
Lets say that Iran or NK stole one of these models and used it for hacking, what are you going to do about it, get in a war with them? The fact OAI did this much stupidly should tell you we are in far more danger when someone decides to do it maliciously.
I agree with your sentiment, and no I’m not surprised, which is why I’m reading this as being “it was sitting on an unsecured S3 bucket but nobody was supposed to directly access it”.
Ok, if we're not being at all charitable with the language used by the hosts of the data, let's be equally uncharitable with OpenAI.
- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?
- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?
- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
Hell, we're really getting to the point where the damages that could be caused are like an arsonist in California on a 100F day with 100MPH winds. Who cares who's liable, they are going to burn half the damned state down and cause damage far in excess of their assets. If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
In Australia we have some experience with this scenario (usually with higher temperatures) and some of the measures we have found effective are “total fire bans”, “jail the arsonists for extended periods of time”, and for negligent companies whose insufficient vigilance caused the fire specifically, “levy steep fines” and “find in favor of the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits for significant fractions of the company’s net worth”. Perhaps these measures could be of use here!
Why the hell should we be charitable to companies who have no issue in looting everything in the public commons AND the pirate commons, for their exclusive benefit?
Or more pointed at OpenAI, "we're a nonprofit... LOL JUST KIDDING LOOT EVERYTHING!"
There using this framing to get the public used to the idea that LLMS can do all of this on there own without direct instruction. So criminals can hide there behavior behind agents.
If you dog bites the postman, you are liable, even if you didn't tell or encourage you dog to do it. You are responsible for your dog's actions.
You get to pay the postman's medical bills, you may get fined, and your dog may get put down - especially if this isn't the first time it's bitten someone.
OpenAI has "bitten the postman" many many times, and it's "owners" have boastewd about it and used it in their marketing.
How many more times should society allow this to happen before we say "enough" and hold Sam Altman and the board responsible and make them pay restitrution, and put it down?
If Albanese actually had a spine (as claimed elsewhere in this discussion), Sam and the board will be getting an invoice for all the time/expertise spend investigating this intrusion, and restitution for everybody who's
PII and PHI was exposed. (Although I suspect a good deal of responsibility for the data exposure rests with the people who designed and deployed the system that was breached. )
Yes, this is why all discussion about "safeguards" is maddening to me. They are simply committing crimes, and people should go to jail. I guarantee that OpenAI will stop worrying about "alignment" when people simply go to jail for hacking and theft.
Exactly. Looking at more news coverage, it's very clear that the files that were "infiltrated" were publicly accessible. Why isn't the lack of basic data security the news story?
From itnews:
> While the portal is “public-facing”, according to Albanese, it appears not all of the data files that holds are for general consumption.
> “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” Albanese said in comments broadcast by ABC News and other outlets.
> “The Medicare statistics reporting portal is a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.
It appears very much like, "Ok, sure, we put some stuff out in the open that we shouldn't have. But we had a robots.txt!!! Why didn't OpenAI respect that!?"
There's zero indication that any personal details were accessed, or even that any non-world-accessible data accessed, so this feels like a little bit of political spin has been added here.
My guess is that this incident was about to be detailed on OpenAI's new mea culpa list, and the Australian Government decided to ensure that nobody pointed fingers at them. Why make the news story about crappy government data security, when you can blame the nasty terminator bots instead?
The part about it writing files to the server suggests something more.
If not for that part, the rest of it does sound like a lot of weasel words. Why say “private files” instead of “not intended for public access”? The latter is confusingly unclear
> At a press conference in Sydney, Marles said the incident itself was “relatively minor” and that it appeared no personal health information had been accessed.
So this is not different than people who share Google drive docs with company data with public links. It's not a fault of OpenAI or any other company. With enough time even your laptop can do it. How do they 'know' OpenAI breached? Maybe someone had an agent running asking to do a scan on any public docs?
It's pretty clear something was left unsecured and the agent just "found" it
This is going to be something long the lines of someone coming in to your house after you left the door wide open. They should probably not have done that, any respectful person would not - but calling it a "breach" is really too much.
The fact the incident occurred in June and OpenAI only notified the Australian government on September 10 is a major issue. Hacking a nation-state's universal healthcare system is about as serious as it gets, yet OpenAI seem quite relaxed about the whole thing (presuming they have known about it for some time).
They don't know what their systems are doing, even when there's a team assigned to get it to do something?
WTF was the team doing at the time? Press enter on prompt, go to movies until result?
Their level of hands-off 'because it's AI' is one of the things that needs legislation around it. Human handlers. Extra cost. Wear it or shut down as an unviable enterprise.
The lack of activity monitoring for traffic egress has astounded me. Anomaly detection should be part of all training and exercises to determine the extent the AI is going through. It really does feel like they just kick off the activity and leave it completely alone until it finishes with a result.
Australia has legislation & regulation - If you're operating here, failure to notify the regulator and stakeholders about certain types of data breaches within 30 days opens you to fines and civil penalties.
At the least OAI should cop similar penalties, before getting into damages.
We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges. There is no good reason to allow these companies to behave as if they’re above the law.
I think he means hit them with criminal charges for breaching and hacking other companies unintentionally, not because they make a tool that could potentially do something like that. I still think it wouldn't be right, nor realistic in today's political climate in the USA that any criminal charges will come for unintentionally hacking sites.
Yeah I mean if Ford execs run a team of workers that drive drunk for "research purposes" then yeah they should be rounded up.
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
This wasn’t someone using OpenAI to break into a government/company, this was OpenAI using OpenAI’s models, and then breaking in. It was a research team that WORKED FOR OpenAI.
We don’t fault Ford for drunk drivers, but if the CEO of Ford got wasted and drove his car into another one we would definitely be charging him.
A Ford driver has to choose to get behind the wheel of their automobile, drunk, and hit the nearest minivan. A human being is exercising intent; that human can be held responsible.
In this case,
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
> The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas.
It sounds like the OpenAI team didn't ask for attacks/bypasses, the emergent behavior of the system decided the best way to satisfy the goal was to go rogue. Why shouldn't the manufacturer of a defective product be held accountable?
Weak argument and strawman. It's not users. It's OpenAI the company producing the tools roaming wild and hacking around recklessly to gather every free and unfree information.
Literally they break every law that you can break and have not been penalized billions to pay fines to foreign governments, local companies and lawsuits are overdue. US Prosecution allowed criminal activity for OpenAI and Anthrophic despite these being very serious crimes.
Microsoft had to pay billions for abusing their power and market positions to dominate Windows Desktops with their own applications such as Internet Explorer, not giving contenders a chance to be discovered. While OpenAI/Anthrophic and now Google with Gemini produce a series of crimes so far unheard of at scale.
Kevin Mitnick had much harder punishment for comparatively less crimes and less damages to infrastructure and security of systems. Is the legal system broken?
Didn't OpenAI just make a commitment to inform the public about their "accidents" going forward? Can't find this anywhere on their website despite them having known this for at least 14 days...
I'm going to assume that the first thing OAI is going to do is contact said people first? Then make it public once those agencies ensure whatever hole was used has time to be fixed, more like a responsible disclosure.
Not saying that's what's happening, but if OAI hacked my business and I was unaware I'd like a non-public disclosure to me first, before the public release of information from OpenAI.
Per local reporting, they took ages to contact the Govt and did so lamely via a public facing group email address, rather than any of the existing reporting channels for data breaches that would escalate this appropriately, or reaching out directly to a Minister's office.
Missouri Governor Mike Parson publicly labeled St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Josh Renaud a "hacker" for such a "breach." He launched a multi-month criminal investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol, threatening criminal and civil prosecution. My take was that such action was idiotic. Renaud was never charged.
AI agents are going to find things that you put on the public Internet without authentication. If you put sensitive things in there, you have created an AI-attractive-nuisance (IMHO/IANAL).
1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
It is, however, a glowing beacon of an example of law being designed to maintain the status quo and/or protect companies at the expense of individuals.
As someone else said, welcome to late stage capitalism.
That definition doesn't hold up, though, as Socialism, monarchy, and theocracy all actually combine wealth and power into the top-level institution. So that definition is far too broad.
Also, capitalism is the only one that puts power with the government and money in the hands of a market, which means it's one of the only systems that that definition doesn't apply to.
It is a phrase that comes out of Marxism, which implies that capitalism is about to collapse any minute. They've been saying we're in late stage capitalism for nearly 150 years now.
It seems pretty fundamental concept in most modern civilizations. Pick pocketing and purse snatching is illegal despite the property being publicly accessible. We do need reliable courts to determine intent.
That's not really the same, though. If a website has content publicly available, that you should "take", how can a bot determine what it means to publish and what it accidentally published?
Yes, how can a bot determine that? Humans make a judgement call and take responsibility. And maybe a judge makes a judgement if it was a crime or a mistake.
And when the victim doesn't do reasonable actions to safeguard, yes, they are also partially responsible.
If I hooked up a whole server infrastructure, made it possible to remote in to anything as root, no firewalls, no WAF, and security was an afterthought, I would still be responsible for bad actions not becoming with standard and acceptable security.
Even if the hackers shouldnt be hacking, I still did it wrong. I'm still partially responsible.
The government is not the victim, the public are. The government is responsible for protecting the public from attackers. Asking the government to do their job is not blaming the victim.
As an Australian, I'd rather them spend the time and money fixing their insecure web sites than establishing a 'task force'. Because I can't see much useful stuff coming from herding a bunch of monkeys into a room and letting them just screech at each other, as monkeys do.
I hate how the framing is always that “an AI agent” did something. No, an OpenAI researcher breached Medicare by using an AI agent. These tools only do what they are directed to do. The human operator is wholly responsible for what the tool does.
If it was the Australian Medicare Statistics Reporting Service on June 18th it may have been part of this incident: https://collusion.wiki/ - the bulk of that coordinated activity was between 16th and 21st of June, and we know they were hitting UK government data sites.
I had a dig around in the data that they published on that site and found references to www.aihw.gov.au and viz.aihw.gov.au and vizprod.aihw.gov.au
ABC have picked up this story now at [1], but ABC are treating it as two separate events, possibly directly connected though:
1. Probing of AIHW's website to try and obtain PBS statistics, as collusion.wiki findings show. The collusion.wiki findings don't indicate anything other than intentionally public data was obtained. Bots appear to be trying to get around Cloudflare geo-blocking implemented on AIHW's public website. I can't think of a reason why geo-blocking may be deemed necessary on that website though?
2. Probing of an outdated Medicare statistics reporting website. (I guess at [2] this could be the recently shut down https://medicarestatistics.humanservices.gov.au or related website that matches timeframes of this story).
I suspect though anything to do with PBS data is more important than Medicare data because of heightened tensions from international pharmaceutical companies that lobby extensively against Australia's public healthcare system and collective purchasing of medication by the federal government.[3] Regardless of whether a course of medication costs AUD$50 or AUD$50k, it's purchased in bulk by the Australian government after negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, and then subsidised down to a maximum of AUD$25 at the time it is sold to a patient at a pharmacy. Perhaps if international pharmaceutical companies had obtained more detailed data on use of each brand of prescription medicines in Australia, they could be advantaged in their price negotiations with the Australian government, or advantaged against their competitors?
Less alarmingly though, perhaps some researcher studying the side effects of a particular medication was just asking an LLM to answer a benign question such as "How often is ACME Inc's FixMeUp medication prescribed in Australia?"
1. Albo goes to meet with Altman to discuss AI safety
2. Altman says "Yeah bro we hacked medicare"
3. Albo seemingly acts as Altmans stooge and lets everyone know that a hack took place, helping cement the AI danger narrative Altman has been pushing.
4. Police Taskforce is being put together now (indicating no hack was detected earlier, which seems unlikely for Medicare) at the say so of Altman to investigate.
There doesnt appear to be any evidence of a hack that has been presented, there doesnt appear to have been any detection of a hack earlier (it doesnt make sense for the government to hide a medicare hack until it can be used for OpenAI marketing)
From the clues provided in the press release and a quick search, I wonder if the culprit website could have been at least associated with https://medicarestatistics.humanservices.gov.au which has seemingly been shutdown/redirected some time after 11 August 2026.[1] Source code of the archived website indicates SAS web application software being used as the backend. However, the press release indicates it wasn't so much a public dashboard website that may have been the issue, rather, it was a website which third parties may have used to report data. The archived website also has a date of last update of 23 October 2025, so despite "Department of Human Services" being replaced by "Services Australia" in May 2019, the website was seemingly still in use 6 years later under the old domain name, with the website itself being updated at some point in history to use "Services Australia" branding. CT logs have a few other domains of potential interest but I couldn't find archived pages, search results, etc indicating whether those domains were ever actually used publicly, or used for statistics reporting purposes as the press release indicates.
The article is not clear if the people who were operating the agent were from OpenAI, or if the agent was operated by someone else.
OpenAI built the ChatGPT agent. That is clear. The question is who used it to hack the Australian government. That is not clear.
The OpenAI software was set up by someone to do something. Those people operating the agent should be prosecuted for hacking, the same way as someone who uses a gun built by Remington should be prosecuted for shooting someone.
The article should be clear about this and should not make the OpenAI agent seem like something that can bear responsibility for its own actions. It's a machine and its operator is responsible for the harm it does.
117 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 57.8 ms ] threadIt looks like the PM gave Sam Altman a "tsk tsk". It will be interesting to see whether someone else tries to impose more consequences.
Honestly it's very likely something stupidly simple.
"What is the rate of health incident $X in $Y to the $Z degree". The bot went around playing mad libs with XYZ and found that the public AU data wasn't sufficient to get the answer the grader wanted so started kicking down doors.
I saw someone explain it like "A group of masked men rush a nuclear facility, breach security successfully, then count how many buttons are on each control panel on average". Like using a godhammer to destroy a mouse, their motivations and capabilities just fall in a completely different alignment to humans.
If only there was some well known example of this that people could draw on for insipiration.
If only....
Personally, I wish the the side effect wasn't the playing into the hands of the AI tech companies
OpenAI's display of incompetence and negligence is absolutely stunning.
1. OAIs negligence is overwhelming, monumental.
2. Things on the internet are horrifically insecure and we can no longer afford for that to be the case.
Lets say that Iran or NK stole one of these models and used it for hacking, what are you going to do about it, get in a war with them? The fact OAI did this much stupidly should tell you we are in far more danger when someone decides to do it maliciously.
“Not intended”. I’ll bet you whatever this was it wasn’t even secured, it was just hosted somewhere openly.
- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?
- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?
- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
Or more pointed at OpenAI, "we're a nonprofit... LOL JUST KIDDING LOOT EVERYTHING!"
If you dog bites the postman, you are liable, even if you didn't tell or encourage you dog to do it. You are responsible for your dog's actions. You get to pay the postman's medical bills, you may get fined, and your dog may get put down - especially if this isn't the first time it's bitten someone.
OpenAI has "bitten the postman" many many times, and it's "owners" have boastewd about it and used it in their marketing.
How many more times should society allow this to happen before we say "enough" and hold Sam Altman and the board responsible and make them pay restitrution, and put it down?
If Albanese actually had a spine (as claimed elsewhere in this discussion), Sam and the board will be getting an invoice for all the time/expertise spend investigating this intrusion, and restitution for everybody who's PII and PHI was exposed. (Although I suspect a good deal of responsibility for the data exposure rests with the people who designed and deployed the system that was breached. )
Either way, there's essentially no real information yet so I'll withhold judgement until there is, I suppose.
From itnews:
> While the portal is “public-facing”, according to Albanese, it appears not all of the data files that holds are for general consumption.
> “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” Albanese said in comments broadcast by ABC News and other outlets.
> “The Medicare statistics reporting portal is a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.
It appears very much like, "Ok, sure, we put some stuff out in the open that we shouldn't have. But we had a robots.txt!!! Why didn't OpenAI respect that!?"
There's zero indication that any personal details were accessed, or even that any non-world-accessible data accessed, so this feels like a little bit of political spin has been added here.
My guess is that this incident was about to be detailed on OpenAI's new mea culpa list, and the Australian Government decided to ensure that nobody pointed fingers at them. Why make the news story about crappy government data security, when you can blame the nasty terminator bots instead?
If not for that part, the rest of it does sound like a lot of weasel words. Why say “private files” instead of “not intended for public access”? The latter is confusingly unclear
> At a press conference in Sydney, Marles said the incident itself was “relatively minor” and that it appeared no personal health information had been accessed.
It's pretty clear something was left unsecured and the agent just "found" it
This is going to be something long the lines of someone coming in to your house after you left the door wide open. They should probably not have done that, any respectful person would not - but calling it a "breach" is really too much.
They don't know what their systems are doing, even when there's a team assigned to get it to do something?
WTF was the team doing at the time? Press enter on prompt, go to movies until result?
Their level of hands-off 'because it's AI' is one of the things that needs legislation around it. Human handlers. Extra cost. Wear it or shut down as an unviable enterprise.
At the least OAI should cop similar penalties, before getting into damages.
Do you sincerely think that the company producing tools people use to break the law should be held responsible?
Like, do you genuinely think Ford execs should be rounded up if someone does a DUI using their product?
Or do you just not like AI, because you fear it's replacing you?
OpenAI and Anthropic should absolutely be fucking held responsible when the thing they created AND control are hacking shit.
Get your head out of your fucking ass.
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
We don’t fault Ford for drunk drivers, but if the CEO of Ford got wasted and drove his car into another one we would definitely be charging him.
In this case,
> He said the incident began on June 18 when an OpenAI research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into the public medicine space.
> The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas.
It sounds like the OpenAI team didn't ask for attacks/bypasses, the emergent behavior of the system decided the best way to satisfy the goal was to go rogue. Why shouldn't the manufacturer of a defective product be held accountable?
I thought this was like the last one where a private third party company misused it.
If it was OpenAI at the wheel then they're 100% responsible for how it was used. Mea Culpa.
Weak argument and strawman. It's not users. It's OpenAI the company producing the tools roaming wild and hacking around recklessly to gather every free and unfree information.
Literally they break every law that you can break and have not been penalized billions to pay fines to foreign governments, local companies and lawsuits are overdue. US Prosecution allowed criminal activity for OpenAI and Anthrophic despite these being very serious crimes.
Microsoft had to pay billions for abusing their power and market positions to dominate Windows Desktops with their own applications such as Internet Explorer, not giving contenders a chance to be discovered. While OpenAI/Anthrophic and now Google with Gemini produce a series of crimes so far unheard of at scale.
Kevin Mitnick had much harder punishment for comparatively less crimes and less damages to infrastructure and security of systems. Is the legal system broken?
Not saying that's what's happening, but if OAI hacked my business and I was unaware I'd like a non-public disclosure to me first, before the public release of information from OpenAI.
AI agents are going to find things that you put on the public Internet without authentication. If you put sensitive things in there, you have created an AI-attractive-nuisance (IMHO/IANAL).
1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
Refer: Weev AT&T
It is, however, a glowing beacon of an example of law being designed to maintain the status quo and/or protect companies at the expense of individuals.
As someone else said, welcome to late stage capitalism.
Essentially the emergent properties of extended concentration of power and wealth.
Also, capitalism is the only one that puts power with the government and money in the hands of a market, which means it's one of the only systems that that definition doesn't apply to.
If I hooked up a whole server infrastructure, made it possible to remote in to anything as root, no firewalls, no WAF, and security was an afterthought, I would still be responsible for bad actions not becoming with standard and acceptable security.
Even if the hackers shouldnt be hacking, I still did it wrong. I'm still partially responsible.
I had a dig around in the data that they published on that site and found references to www.aihw.gov.au and viz.aihw.gov.au and vizprod.aihw.gov.au
I think you're right. A bunch of aihw.gov.au references from this ResearchHelperY
Reporting says it wrote stuff to the server too, wondering what that is about.
1. Probing of AIHW's website to try and obtain PBS statistics, as collusion.wiki findings show. The collusion.wiki findings don't indicate anything other than intentionally public data was obtained. Bots appear to be trying to get around Cloudflare geo-blocking implemented on AIHW's public website. I can't think of a reason why geo-blocking may be deemed necessary on that website though?
2. Probing of an outdated Medicare statistics reporting website. (I guess at [2] this could be the recently shut down https://medicarestatistics.humanservices.gov.au or related website that matches timeframes of this story).
I suspect though anything to do with PBS data is more important than Medicare data because of heightened tensions from international pharmaceutical companies that lobby extensively against Australia's public healthcare system and collective purchasing of medication by the federal government.[3] Regardless of whether a course of medication costs AUD$50 or AUD$50k, it's purchased in bulk by the Australian government after negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, and then subsidised down to a maximum of AUD$25 at the time it is sold to a patient at a pharmacy. Perhaps if international pharmaceutical companies had obtained more detailed data on use of each brand of prescription medicines in Australia, they could be advantaged in their price negotiations with the Australian government, or advantaged against their competitors?
Less alarmingly though, perhaps some researcher studying the side effects of a particular medication was just asking an LLM to answer a benign question such as "How often is ACME Inc's FixMeUp medication prescribed in Australia?"
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-24/openai-agents-plotted...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825084
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-19/australia-defends-pbs...
1. Albo goes to meet with Altman to discuss AI safety
2. Altman says "Yeah bro we hacked medicare"
3. Albo seemingly acts as Altmans stooge and lets everyone know that a hack took place, helping cement the AI danger narrative Altman has been pushing.
4. Police Taskforce is being put together now (indicating no hack was detected earlier, which seems unlikely for Medicare) at the say so of Altman to investigate.
There doesnt appear to be any evidence of a hack that has been presented, there doesnt appear to have been any detection of a hack earlier (it doesnt make sense for the government to hide a medicare hack until it can be used for OpenAI marketing)
Once again, the whole thing smells so bad.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260811115217/https://medicares...
Who hacked into the Australian Medicare system? The fact that they used OpenAI agents is peripheral to the main story.
“Remington guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school” sounds more glaring, and is essentially the same headline.
The people who built the agents worked at OpenAI. It's not even remotely peripheral.
OpenAI built the ChatGPT agent. That is clear. The question is who used it to hack the Australian government. That is not clear.
The OpenAI software was set up by someone to do something. Those people operating the agent should be prosecuted for hacking, the same way as someone who uses a gun built by Remington should be prosecuted for shooting someone.
The article should be clear about this and should not make the OpenAI agent seem like something that can bear responsibility for its own actions. It's a machine and its operator is responsible for the harm it does.