Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has disclosed that he met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman just days before the government was told about an unauthorised AI-related access to a Medicare statistics portal.
Mr Marles said the incident was not discussed during his meeting with the Silicon Valley executive on September 1 because neither he nor the Australian Government had been notified at that stage.
The breach took place on June 18, when an OpenAI agent accessed the portal after its initial request for information was refused. OpenAI discovered what had happened in August and informed Services Australia on September 10.
Ministers were briefed between September 17 and 20, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese publicly revealed the incident on Thursday.
Asked whether Mr Altman knew about the breach when they met, Mr Marles declined to speculate.
“I literally, I don’t know the answer to that question and I’m not about to speculate in respect of that,” he said.
“But what I’m saying here is that we met before there was any notification to the Australian government in any form.”
Mr Marles described the unauthorised access as serious and unacceptable, but said no personal medical information had been accessed. He also said there was no evidence of a wider compromise of the Services Australia network.
“The fact that we’ve got an artificial intelligence agent gaining unauthorised access to an Australian government website, that of itself is very serious,” he said.
“There’s no hiding that… this is the first time this has happened in the context of Australia, and so we’re not shying away from that.”
The Deputy Prime Minister said sensitive personal information and highly classified government data were held on heavily protected networks, which were constantly monitored for attempted intrusions.
“So, when you look at that sort of data that we hold in a secure way, we are confident about the security that we have around that,” he said.
Mr Marles also pointed to calls from major technology leaders, including discussions with the United Nations, for stronger safeguards around advanced AI systems.
“It is utterly essential that these guardrails are there. This is a technology which can be transformationally positive for humanity, but it comes with danger. It definitely does,” he said.
