Gallagher flags mandatory AI breach reporting after OpenAI incident
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei will not appear at the Greens-led Australian Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres this week, though representatives of the company are expected to attend a separate joint standing committee hearing on AI scheduled for next week. The chair of the inquiry, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, wrote to Amodei and to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman last week asking them to appear at the Thursday hearing.
The invitation followed Albanese’s revelation that OpenAI agents had infiltrated systems run by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria’s Department of Health, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Medicare statistics reporting service portal of Services Australia. Albanese, who was in the United States when he announced the breach, said he had spoken with Altman “to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident.”
Neither company’s executives could be compelled to appear before the Senate committee, given they are based outside Australia. It is understood that Anthropic — the company behind the Claude chatbot — will not attend the hearing this week. The company’s local team is not in Australia, and the invitation was considered last-minute. An alternative date for the hearing has been sought, according to the Guardian.
Anthropic is, however, expected to attend a separate joint standing committee hearing on AI next week. Amodei will not attend, but it is understood representatives of the company’s Australian and US operations will appear. In a submission to that committee, Anthropic warned that governments had a critical role in reinforcing a responsible approach to AI by industry, while also arguing that frontier AI was not just an economic capability but also a “national security capability.”
“It matters which countries build the most capable models, and on whose terms they are deployed,” Anthropic said in the submission. “The most capable AI models are built in the United States. Broadening that development out to trusted allies like Australia is critical and will support efforts to ensure that the capability of democracies outpace those of authoritarian states.”
OpenAI was approached for comment. Finance and government services minister Katy Gallagher flagged that new mandatory reporting rules could be introduced for AI data breaches. After criticism of the government’s slow response to the incident, Services Australia has put in place new procedures to ensure real-time monitoring of information sent to the public-facing email address used by OpenAI to report the hacking.
“It is the first time that we’re aware that an agent acting on its own, not with the authority of OpenAI, was able to get into one of our data systems, and I think we did the right thing,” Gallagher said. Cabinet was briefed on the ongoing investigation on Monday, as the company continued to cooperate with Services Australia and the Australian Signals Directorate.
Gallagher said the investigation would take a matter of weeks to be completed. She confirmed that the statistical website accessed in the incident had been decommissioned and that the data had been transferred to a new portal. The taskforce would also review how OpenAI’s agent had interacted with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s website.
According to the ABC, an obscure German wiki site that was reportedly hijacked and used as a message board for the agents showed that they tried and failed to access AIHW website data over multiple days in June this year. Part of $160 million in new funding for cybersecurity improvements at Services Australia, announced in the May budget, will be used for the response to the OpenAI incident.
“The kind of cyber protections of a public-facing website, versus our systems of government significance are quite different, and they are under constant, constant attention from people who would like to get in,” Gallagher said. “Those systems are the ones that the upgrade will be focused on.”
Opposition leader Angus Taylor said every cyber-attack was serious but criticised Albanese for waiting to reveal the incident publicly. Gallagher rejected Coalition claims that the government had politicised the Medicare breach, rejected suggestions that Labor had delayed a public announcement, and disputed claims that the government had overstated the significance of the rogue agent’s actions.