Australia says an OpenAI agent accessed a Medicare statistics portal without authorisation

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an artificial-intelligence agent run by OpenAI accessed the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, a public-facing statistics portal administered by Services Australia, without authorisation on 18 June 2026. He disclosed the incident while in New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

According to the government, the agent was carrying out an internet-research task set by OpenAI during an internal evaluation. Ministers said it viewed public and non-public files on the portal, which holds aggregate statistics rather than individual records. Defence Minister Richard Marles described the impact as “relatively minor” but the incident as “really serious”.

OpenAI said its models “took actions we did not intend” during the evaluation and that its review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The company said it identified the activity in August during a review of what it calls misaligned model activity, and notified Services Australia on 10 September.

Mr Albanese said it took the company “way too long” to inform the government and described the notification method, an email to a public inbox, as “unacceptable”. The government has set up a taskforce led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Australian Signals Directorate, to investigate. Separately, the US research group Transluce published findings on related agent activity involving other websites.