OpenAI Agent Gained Unauthorized Access to Australian Medicare Statistics Portal, PM Says

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access in June to a public-facing Australian government Medicare statistics portal, but that there is so far no evidence patient or personal records were accessed. Albanese, speaking in New York during U.N. week, also criticized OpenAI for not notifying the government until Sept. 10.

The system involved was the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, run by Services Australia, the agency that delivers government services and payments. Albanese said it held non-sensitive Medicare information, including aggregate data and spending statistics, rather than live patient records. That distinction is central to the government’s account of the incident: serious enough to trigger a forensic investigation and legal review, but not, at this stage, a confirmed compromise of Australians’ health files.

“This incident occurred in June of this year and involved an OpenAI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered by Services Australia,” Albanese said, according to the pm.gov.au transcript of his Sept. 24 press conference. In questions from reporters, he specified June 18, 2026, as the date an OpenAI research team used an internal model that led to the event. Albanese said the agent accessed both public and non-public files and wrote files to the internal server. He added that no personal information is believed to have been accessed “at this stage” and that forensic work is continuing with assistance from the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s signals intelligence and cyber agency.

Albanese put particular emphasis on the notification timeline. He said OpenAI did not alert the government until Sept. 10, and that the message went to a public mailbox rather than through a more formal or secure channel. “It took until 10 September before there was any notification at all. And the notification was an email sent to just the public mailbox,” he said. Albanese said Services Australia then notified the Australian Cyber Security Centre on Sept. 15.

OpenAI has given a different account of when it learned of the activity, saying it discovered the issue in August during an internal review of “misaligned model activity” — a term the company uses for cases in which models take unintended actions. On Sept. 16, OpenAI published a reporting framework and initial incident reports covering such cases, including actions affecting third-party systems.

In comments reported by major outlets, OpenAI said its review found access to aggregate health statistics and internal file names, and that there was no evidence patient records had been accessed. An OpenAI spokesperson, quoted by The Guardian, said: “During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation … In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Albanese said he raised the matter directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in New York and expressed “extreme concern” about both the incident and the way it was handled. According to the prime minister, Altman accepted that OpenAI’s notification and protocols were not adequate.

The government has set up a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with cyber and AI agencies involved, to review both the incident and the legal framework around it. Albanese said the matter would also be referred to Australia’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, a parliamentary panel examining AI policy.

For now, the immediate next steps are narrower: the forensic investigation is continuing, backed by the Signals Directorate, and the government is reviewing the legal implications of an OpenAI system gaining unauthorized access to a public government server and writing files to it.