Technology experts have warned revelations an artificial intelligence agent hacked Medicare’s internal systems will not be the only dangerous breach of government data and have called for Australia to boost its protections against the growing risk. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, challenged the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, on Thursday after the company’s agent infiltrated systems run by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria’s Department of Health, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Medicare statistics reporting service portal of Services Australia. OpenAI alerted the government earlier this month to the June hacking via an email to a public-facing address, a situation Albanese called “obviously unacceptable”.
But the Australian Council on AI Strategy chief executive, Anna-Maria Arabia, said the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident. Johanna Weaver, Australia’s former chief cyber negotiator at the United Nations, agreed more incidents were inevitable. Weaver is a member of the advisory board to the minister for government services, Katy Gallagher, and the executive director of the Tech Policy Design Institute.
What we are seeing now is the tip of the iceberg. It could be the tip of the iceberg, but either way, we can’t be ignoring the risk. It hasn’t been entirely clear if those national standards were going to be very hyper-focused on datacentres and leave governance questions as a bit of a bolt-on.
Officials will look at policies around how AI companies should report cyber-incidents to the government, and how cooperative companies should be during and after an attack. It will also investigate whether the current laws and systems are adequate to stop AI, and how government systems can be strengthened. The shadow industry minister, Andrew Hastie, called for Australia to develop its own domestic AI capability, instead of relying on the US.
The Greens demanded Labor call in the new US ambassador, David Brat, to establish what President Donald Trump knew about the attack.
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