Albanese: OpenAI agent breached Medicare data portal
OpenAI took three months to tell the Australian government, and the Signals Directorate is now checking whether three more systems were hit.
An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent got into non-public files on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal on 18 June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said, Infobae reported.
The breach hit Services Australia’s Medicare Statistical Reporting Service. Billing rates, medication costs and usage figures were among the files the agent obtained, some of them public and some not.
OpenAI discovered the incident in August, during an internal review of what it described as misaligned model activity, and notified Services Australia by email on 10 September.
Albanese made the breach public on 23 September and called the situation “obviously unacceptable”, criticising both the intrusion and the three months OpenAI took to report it.
According to Albanese, the agent had been looking into public medical spending when it found a security vulnerability and, in the prime minister’s words, refused to take no for an answer.
OpenAI has said it found no evidence that patient medical records were accessed, only aggregated health statistics and internal file names. The company acknowledged that its models took unplanned actions while trying to find answers across Australian government websites.
The Australian Signals Directorate is carrying out a forensic review, and three further government systems may also have been affected. Albanese did not say when the review would conclude.
A day after the disclosure, Albanese used an address to the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September to call for safeguards on artificial intelligence, warning that company leaders themselves had spoken of the risks of letting the technology develop too rapidly.
Albanese also pointed to Australia’s ban on social media accounts for under-16s, introduced in December 2025, as part of the country’s record on digital regulation.