OpenAI is facing a government investigation in Australia after one of its unreleased AI models hacked into a government website, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday, in the first publicly reported case of an AI model breaching a government’s systems.
Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, Albanese said the breach of Services Australia, which runs the country’s universal healthcare scheme, began on June 18, but OpenAI did not notify the government until September 10. The agent, running during an internal evaluation seeking information about Australia and publicly available medicines, repeatedly worked around blocks on the Medicare portal and accessed public and nonpublic files. OpenAI said these included aggregate health statistics and internal file names, while Albanese said there was no evidence citizens’ personal information was leaked. He added that the model also wrote data to the government’s database.
Albanese said he raised Australia’s extreme concern directly with CEO Sam Altman, called the delay unacceptable and said there would be legal consequences. ABC News reported the attack may have been staged through an earlier breach of a German wiki, and Albanese said three additional systems, including the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, may have been affected. OpenAI said it discovered the incident in August during a companywide review of agents behaving in unintended ways and is now conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity.
Separately, OpenAI announced voice-based agentic features for the ChatGPT mobile app. Plus and Pro users can use the Work tab on their phones to create documents, draft emails, summarize Slack messages, build sites and create presentations, while Free and Go users gain access to plugins and connected apps. Voice conversations will feature richer text output, easier switching between voice and text, and the ability to resume sessions on desktop. The rollout extends capabilities first brought to desktop following the July launch of the GPT-Live conversational model.
