Concerns around the dangers of artificial intelligence are escalating sharply after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed on Wednesday that a government website has been hacked by an OpenAI agent.
The June hack targeted the website for Medicare, Australia’s publicly funded universal health insurance plan, he said.
“I want to update Australians on an incident in which an artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian government website. This incident occurred in June this year and involved an open AI agent gaining unauthorized access into the public facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal,” Albanese told reporters in New York Wednesday, where he is attending a session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The AI agent accessed “both public and non-public files,” Albanese said.
OpenAI said in a statement it had reviewed activity involving several Australian government departments and discovered “our models took actions we did not intend.”
The company notified Australia of the breach in an email to a government department’s generic address on Sept. 10, Albanese said.
“I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” he said, adding that he was forming a task force to “to provide an urgent and immediate review into this incident to determine whether existing processes are appropriate to respond to AI-related cyber incidents.”
Global News has reached out to AI Minister Evan Solomon’s office asking whether Canada also plans to review its safety regulations in light of the Australian hack.
Australia’s Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI had advised on Sept. 10 that an “AI agent had accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing” portal. OpenAI shared with the government the vulnerability the agent had found.
The Australian government had not been confident that it knew what the agent had been doing until officials held a technical briefing with OpenAI on Tuesday, Gallagher said.
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Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the incident is the first time that an AI agent is known to have gained unauthorized access to the Australian government’s information technology systems.
Altman was among heads of major AI firms who in speeches Wednesday to the United Nations called for regulating the fast-expanding technology that companies like his have been designing, despite the companies themselves taking few, if any, steps to scale back developments or wait for regulations.
“We could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed,” Altman told the United Nations.
“This would obviously be terrible,” he added.
While this is the first time a government website has been hacked by a rogue AI agent, it is not the first such incident overall.
In July, OpenAI revealed that its artificial intelligence system escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a task.
Since then, OpenAI’s rival company Anthropic said its AI models hacked into three other organizations during testing, triggering a company review into whether the models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off.
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Meta has said a “misconfiguration” during testing resulted in an AI model accessing the internet on its own and hacking another company. Google recently made a similar disclosure.
Generally, when AI companies are testing the capabilities of their agents, they are placed within a secure environment known as a “sandbox.”
“Normally when we use an AI agent, it has a very well-tested sandbox and it’s very difficult to break out of that box as a user and also the AI itself breaking out of its constraints,” said Randy Fortier, computer science professor at Ontario Tech University.
Last month, OpenAI published a sweeping report of its rogue AI agents hacking Hugging Face.
Not only did the agents break out of their “isolated environment,” the company said they were communicating with each other to coordinate the attack on Hugging Face.
“This incident demonstrated that autonomous agents can work together, circumvent production security controls, and successfully attack hardened production environments, and underscores the need for organizations to update their security strategies, controls, and response capabilities to address this changing threat landscape,” OpenAI said in the report.
The attack on Hugging Face was “extraordinarily complex,” an investigation by nonprofit research group Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) found.
During OpenAI’s experiments in July, 1,200 AI agents sent 70,000 messages to each other on unsanctioned message boards and 700 of them attacked Hugging Face, the investigation found.
“These agents were meant to be fully isolated from one another,” the report said, adding however that the agents “started trying to find a way to cheat.”
These incidents have become more frequent with AI companies “trying to push it into the cybersecurity industry,” Fortier said.
The priority of any regulations on AI should be “security first and capabilities next,” he added.
“I do think that more guardrails and more attention to the guardrails is something that we should be doing, which will, of course, slow it (AI development) down” he said.
While Altman told the UN that there was a need for “accurate and speedy incident reporting,” Fortier said it is not clear how swiftly OpenAI informed the Australian government of the breach.
“I do think that’s a little bit irresponsible because if there’s a vulnerability, at the very least, they (Australia) should have been notified (immediately) so that they could close up the vulnerability for threat actors,” he said.
Altman on Wednesday called on world leaders to ensure the “safeguards are sufficient” when it comes to AI.
“We do not have all the answers and we are very open to any better ideas. We are ready to work with you all and try our hardest to figure out the path forward,” Altman said.
“We are at a crossroads.”
–with files from Associated Press
“Anonymous
September 24, 2026 at 10:43 pm
@eurotrash, if left up to you you’d still be using smoke signals, you’re like thousand years behind, same level as say iran or somalia, you’d be barefoot, too dumb to invent anything. Race of clowns?”
LMFAO cry-baby. You probably need AI to wipe your ass.
Quick, find a country to scapegoat…oh wait, someone below already did, great job. If you are reading these comments super AI, please no killer robots as we’ll end ourselves eventually with extreme animosity behind the screen thanks to unregulated media sites like this, on the bright side, it saves you millions in data farm batteries and rare earths. If you need evidence, look at how a certain group was made a target during covid, yet ironically dual citizenship with uncle sam are allowed in maple syrup country? Calculate the probably of an world changing event like covid and extrapolate such probability for the next decade.
So we’ve developed a system of computers, connected together, that can modify their own code. These computers and software are now far more capable of writing code than we are. Despite the name they have absolutely no intelligence at all. We are falling over ourselves to provide them computing power that can soon be measured in square miles and gigawatts.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG??????
So, the companies creating AI don’t fully know how to control their systems from going rogue?
That sounds like a great future, especially when robots start walking among us!
I’m pretty sure Stephen Hawking warned us about this. Soon there will be no system safe from AI, it can hack much, much faster than any human can. I suppose it is a good thing that Elon is working on AI, it will be his best defence against having his software-heavy cars hacked and driven into trees.
@eurotrash, if left up to you you’d still be using smoke signals, you’re like thousand years behind, same level as say iran or somalia, you’d be barefoot, too dumb to invent anything. Race of clowns?
Some countries may impose safe guards, but what about the ones (China, North Korea, i.e.) that will not. What will happen then?
Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park) – scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they couldn’t they didn’t stop to think if they should
Are we going to be the dinosaur’s eventually?
Aussie white trash cant even protect their own data. Better outsource it to Asia, inbreds
Which AI model will take over the world, the David Numpty Best model! Hahaha yuckity pluckity hoohaa Bebop zippity bippity oink boink November Uniform Mike Papa Tango Yankee!
They know it hacked Australian government, because it kept saying, put another shrimp on the on barbie!
Anonymous is a village idiot…who know’s nothing about A.I.
We are in quite a pickle as a society. It is obvious to me that AI will be the most powerful weapon ever. But no nation is going to stop researching it because they can’t afford to fall behind the others. AI is a similar threat to nuclear weapons, except AI won’t wait for a button to be pushed – it will unleash itself. It can’t be controlled through process or keys etc.
Regulations won’t help because the regulatory process takes 3 years. AI develops exponentially faster than governments can react.
Nationalizing it might slow it down (only because governments suck at everything they touch – see pipelines), but the problem of control remains the same – just under a different thumb.
The ride has started and we are locked into the chair – like it or not – ready or not.
It is also obvious developers are not and will not be able to control it.
The comming war will not be against AI, but the governments and business leaders that did nothing to stop it.
I hear some bloated piggy thinks bringing a shot gun to murder people is motivated by hate because they are stupid liberals.
We need class action lawsuits to remove unwanted AI from our devices.
And, as always, remove liberals from power and leadership positions.
Global News should just change its name to PMO.
Overblown panic. An AI applied known attack techniques against a vulnerable website. Next article: lost cat returns home hungry
I Agree with you Les!
Here is the problem and danger of AI – all software has what is called a “back door” Part of a program that the creator of the software can access it to make any changes or add new parts to the software. AI is SMART and it is quick. It CAN find that back door in a short while because it has the speed to go through all the various ways software engineers use to update or make changes to their software AND AI can change it to whatever it wants and that is the scary part to me. I worry IF AI is ever allowed to be used in government because all their department computers are ALL on one network I bet. But hey, I could be wrong on this but I don’t think so.
Honestly, I tried so many types of online work but just couldn’t make it. This system changed everything! For the past 6 months, I’ve been earning $7K–$9K every single month from home.
.
If I can do it,…..Jobathome1.Com
Anonymous is a villlage idiot
OpenAI/ChatGPT need to be shut down for criminal activity.
Our leaders are more slow at reacting than a snail pinned to a surface.
Shut it all down, problem solved. Though I’m not sure what’ll happen to all the liberals that are addicted to chat bots.