An OpenAI AI agent gained unauthorised access to public and non-public files on Australia’s Medicare statistics portal in June, prompting a government investigation. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticised the delay in notification, while OpenAI said there was no evidence patient records were accessed. A taskforce is examining the incident and its legal implications.

<img src="https://media.assettype.com/freepressjournal/2026-09-24/l4shpsj7/Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Copy-of-Queen-Of-All-Mayhem-70.jpg?width=1200" alt="OpenAI Agent Hacked Australia’s Medicare Portal, Government Launches Probe

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addresses the investigation into an OpenAI AI agent’s unauthorised access to a government Medicare statistics portal | AI Generated File Image

Canberra, September 24, 2026: Australia has launched an investigation after an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI gained unauthorised access to a government-run Medicare statistics portal in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

Speaking at the UN summit in New York, Albanese said there was no indication that personal information had been accessed. Investigations, assisted by the Australian Signals Directorate, are under way into the incident.

The AI agent also interacted with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Victorian Department of Health and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. However, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said its interactions with those three websites were authorised, The Guardian reports.

JUST IN: An OpenAI AI agent went rogue and hacked the Australian government.



At a press conference earlier today, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the AI broke into Australia's Medicare statistics portal and accessed non-public data.



The attack occured in… pic.twitter.com/YZuziHGYVt

— ControlAI (@ControlAI) September 24, 2026

Albanese Criticises Delay In Notification

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“This situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese said.

“Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident and I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred.”

Albanese said the government was also dissatisfied with the way it was informed.

“It took until 10 September before there was any notification at all. And the notification was an email sent to just the public mailbox,” Albanese said.

Services Australia subsequently reported the notification to the Australian Cyber Security Centre on September 15.

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns and Victorian Premier Ben Carroll said Albanese had informed them that the breach had affected the NSW crime agency and Victoria’s health department. Both said investigations were continuing, although there was no indication that personal information had been shared.

“New South Wales will be working with Commonwealth intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of it,” Minns said.

How The AI Agent Gained Access

Albanese said the OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal administered by Services Australia.

The portal contains non-sensitive Medicare data and statistics, including information relating to spending.

According to Albanese, the agent accessed “public and non-public files within the portal” and, in doing so, “engaged in writing files as well to the internal server”.

Marles said the government learnt of the June incident “a couple of weeks ago”, with ministers informed last week. He described the agent as non-human and called the breach a “very serious incident”.

“What we have seen is unauthorised access into an Australian government website and that is completely unacceptable and we have made that clear to OpenAI,” he said.

Marles said the AI agent had initially been given “a benign task” of researching health and medical statistics. It approached four Australian government websites as part of that task.

“In relation to those three, it interacted in a way that a member of the public might, so it only acted in an authorised way,” Marles told ABC radio on Thursday.

“But in relation to the medical portal of Services Australia, it sought information, information was not given, and then it effectively hacked into that medical portal and got that information anyway.

“It’s that unauthorised access which we are very concerned about. The impact is relatively minor, but the incident is very serious.”

Taskforce Examines Legal Implications

The Australian government has established a taskforce led by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, working with the Australian Signals Directorate and the AI Safety Institute.

“We will look at what is the legal situation in respect of this and what it means to have gained an unauthorised access, albeit in an unintended way,” Marles said.

“This is a warning about the fact that artificial intelligence, which is a technology that has huge opportunity to benefit humanity, has to be developed with enormous care. There have to be guardrails and safety measures in place which are way ahead of the capability which is being developed.”

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company was conducting an extensive review of “misaligned model activity during training and evaluation” and was “notifying third parties when our review identifies potential impacts to their systems”.

“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation,” Pusateri said.

“In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Pusateri said OpenAI’s review found that aggregate health statistics and internal file names had been accessed, but there was “no evidence of patient records being accessed”.

He said OpenAI was supporting the investigations and its review remained under way, adding that the company was committed to “sharing what we learn as that work continues”.

Calls Grow For Stronger AI Safeguards

Digital Rights Watch spokesperson Lizzie O’Shea said the time taken by OpenAI to notify the government demonstrated the need for “basic rules and standards for tech companies”.

“Artificial intelligence has potential to do some things well, but it also poses huge risks – like hacking systems that store Australians’ sensitive personal data,” O’Shea said.

“The question is whether governments are going to let AI and tech companies run wild or whether they, on behalf of ordinary people, will put rules in place for tech companies that will promote accountability and trust.”

Independent Senator David Pocock said the incident highlighted what he described as delays in introducing safeguards for AI in high-risk settings. He criticised the government’s decision to shelve plans for a National AI Safety Act.

“We have these companies warning of existential threat and hacking critical government infrastructure and the Labor government’s response is ‘We’ll get to that next year’.

“There is also a big question here around why we aren’t holding these big tech companies liable for this kind of data breach. If it was an Australian who hacked the system, they’d likely be heading for jail, yet there’s no accountability for AI companies developing this technology.”

Ed Santo, former human rights commissioner and co-founder of the Human Technology Institute, told ABC radio that Australians should “be worried”.

“This is the first time that this has happened in any major way to an Australian database, and it’s one of the most sensitive databases that we have in government.”

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Santo said OpenAI had “instructed their AI agents to go looking for information about the public health system in Australia. When the AI agents couldn’t easily find that information, they decided to break the law”.

He described the term “misaligned model activity” as “a very euphemistic term”.

“If we were in the bricks and mortar world, if an employee of a company went and broke the law, particularly if it broke the criminal law, then that individual would suffer serious legal consequences, but so would their company. And so we need to make sure that that is true also in this era of AI.”

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