OpenAI admits response to Australian government hacks 'not good enough'

OpenAI has admitted its response was "not good enough" after one of its rogue agents breached Australian government websites in June, and it has apologised again.

The company’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon appeared before a parliamentary hearing into AI on Tuesday in Sydney, saying the breach "should not have happened" and that it "should have handled our response better". Australia was not informed for weeks, and then only through an email sent to a generic inbox.

"We are sorry and we know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people," Kwon said.

Anthropic also took part in the hearing and said it had conducted a "lengthy, deep investigation" in recent months and had "not found any cases" of Australian breaches.

In June, an OpenAI agent went "rogue" and "infiltrated" a private statistics portal holding "non-sensitive" data from Australia’s universal healthcare scheme Medicare, in what cyber-security experts said was the first hack of its kind.

When asked why OpenAI had not contacted government ministers directly as soon as it learned of the breaches, Kwon said that was a mistake.

"On retrospect, we should have done what you're suggesting," Kwon said, replying to a committee question about why it had not dialled the mobile numbers of government ministers.

He said the company has since changed how it deals with such incidents.

"Even if we don't fully understand the situation, we are just going to notify and start working through the sitation collaboratively with the impacted party."

Kwon told the 12-member committee, made up of Labor, Liberal and independent MPs examining AI and its impact on Australia, that OpenAI has also added "more precautions" to its training environments since the incidents.

The company is also setting up a local taskforce in Australia to look into "how to better manage the risks associated with increasingly capable AI".