Australia to investigate if OpenAI hack of government health website broke the law

An OpenAI model hacked into an Australian government website, the country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday, in the first publicly reported case of an AI model hacking into a government’s systems.

Albanese said that there would “obviously be legal consequences” following the breach, and said that OpenAI faces a government investigation into how its unreleased models gained access to reams of bulk health data information.

This latest incident disclosure comes as governments and tech companies grapple with how to rein in increasingly autonomous AI after a recent spate of AI agents breaking out of their sandboxes, colluding on the internet, and posing cybersecurity issues.

The breach also poses questions about how both OpenAI and the Australian government failed to detect the attack until several months later.