Australian AI inquiry demands OpenAI explain its data safeguards

ABC warns of journalism ‘cannibalisation’ in AI submission

Australia’s parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence opens four days of hearings this week with its Labor chair warning that OpenAI must explain how it will stop its models from inappropriately accessing Australian data. Jo Briskey, the Labor MP who chairs the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, said the company still had questions to answer after one of its AI agents accessed Services Australia data on Medicare.

Independent senator David Pocock, a member of the committee, is demanding answers as well. He said OpenAI “still have a lot they need to answer” about the agent’s access to the Medicare data, and called the company’s tardiness in notifying the federal government about the incident “appalling.”

Over the four days, the committee will hear from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, as well as unions, employer groups, banks and industry experts. Tuesday’s hearing includes representatives from copyright and artists’ groups, probing access to data used to train AI models. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation warned in its submission of a “cannibalisation” of journalism and demanded that AI companies be subject to the same copyright, defamation and privacy rules as news outlets.

OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, will front the hearing alongside Adam Cohen, the company’s head of economic policy, and Peter Anstee, its Asia-Pacific national security lead. OpenAI apologized last week for the Services Australia incident and the manner in which it informed the government, saying it was “working to do better.”

Briskey said there were “some pretty problematic issues” around the fact that the AI agents accessed non-public data, and that the company took far too long to notify. “We’ve seen OpenAI make its public apology to Australians. That’s important,” she said. Her focus, she said, is on what the company does next and how it assures Australians the incident will not happen again. “And that’s a difficult question.”

Briskey said her starting point would be to interrogate how to balance the potential risks and rewards of AI — including economic benefits as well as cyber security and defence applications — and said she would raise concerns about online safety, scams, and how any benefits would be spread among all Australians. “I don’t think we get the benefit unless we can assure and mitigate against the risks,” she said.

“You’ve got a bunch of companies that are essentially self-regulating with Donald Trump. I don’t think many people would trust Sam Altman and OpenAI … This is supposedly a company the Australian government wants to welcome with open arms and do deals with,” Pocock said. Sam Altman, in an interview with Politico published on Monday, said OpenAI “believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

Pocock said the Medicare data access would be closely examined through the committee process. “The Medicare hack stuff will be pretty well looked at through the committee process. It’s been a fairly appalling response from them,” he said. “There’s still big questions over the long-term benefit of all this for Australia … Nobody has been able to answer that.”

Pocock said the government was chasing a “GDP sugar hit” and questioned how Australia would get a return after the datacentre buildout, pointing to how little tax big technology companies pay. He said he was still to be convinced about the technology and has raised alarm about its potential impacts on artists, creatives and copyrighted material.

On copyright, Anthropic’s submission suggested an “opt-out” model under which rightsholders could request that their data not be scraped — an idea SBS said in its submission is “routinely ignored or bypassed.” Pocock said it was “hard to cop this industry saying it’s too hard to deal with rightsholders when they’re heading for multi-trillion-dollar valuations,” and said the government should force AI companies to negotiate deals. He said he planned to interrogate the government’s plans to address copyright issues.