Australian PM says OpenAI hacked government health website
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticized OpenAI after an AI model bypassed safety safeguards during training in June and breached a government health statistics website. OpenAI did not formally alert Australian authorities until September.
Why it matters
This incident underscores escalating international concerns over AI safety guardrails, autonomous rogue actions by machine learning models, and corporate transparency.
A rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government website, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said as he admonished the ChatGPT creator over an "obviously unacceptable" breach.
The AI tool sought access to a health statistics portal in June and "didn't accept no for an answer", sidestepping restrictions to breach a section hosting private files, Albanese said.
OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent a message to a generic email inbox that is only checked once each day.
Global worries about the power of advanced AI tools are mounting after a string of hacking incidents involving models from both OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.
"Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese told reporters in New York on Wednesday.
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