Rogue OpenAI agent hacks government site

Oliver Conway (0:00)

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 14 Hours GMT on Thursday, the 24th of September. Australia condemns OpenAI for a delay in reporting an AI hacking attack on a government website. Three US news outlets are denied access to the White House despite a ruling from a US judge. And Tigrayan rebels say they're in a full-blown war with the Ethiopian government.

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There have been more than a dozen reported cases of artificial intelligence going rogue and getting into the computer systems of other companies. Now comes news of the first known AI hacking attack on a foreign government. Australia said an OpenAI agent breached its National Health Data Portal in June. The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said he was very unhappy with the US tech giant.

Anthony Albanese (1:16)

I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sem Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident. And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government of what had occurred. And the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.

Oliver Conway (1:39)

Our Australia correspondent, Katie Watson, told me what happened.

Katie Watson (1:43)

This AI agent breached a health care data portal. So Medicare is the universal health care system here in Australia. And it basically hacked into a portal with lots of data, numbers, statistics. So it wasn't sensitive data. It wasn't personal data. This was about numbers. And in fact, the deputy prime minister, Richard Miles, spoke earlier and said that this was relatively minor in terms of a breach. But of course, that doesn't make it not serious. It was still a big concern, especially with the growing capabilities of AI, what that could mean for the future. So they've set up a task force, and that's going to involve cyber security agencies, AI agencies, they're going to look into exactly what happened. And we know it happened in June. In fact, OpenAI said that this is called a misaligned model activity. Effectively, instructions sent to the AI agent to get some data, meant that they also did some activities that they didn't intend to happen. That's how OpenAI explained it. So that happened in June.

OpenAI became aware of the problem in August. And then it was in September, the 10th of September, that they sent an email to Services Australia, which basically looks after the portal. And it was an email that's often used for academics, researchers, to alert authorities about vulnerabilities in the system, which is what they did. But of course, the Australian government has been pretty cross about the fact that they didn't escalate this and talk to the government at a quicker rate.

Oliver Conway (3:19)

Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary, given the sensitivity of this issue, that there wasn't contact at a higher level much earlier.

Katie Watson (3:26)

Yeah, OpenAI said they had to investigate what was going on. And they came to this because they were doing some investigations into this misaligned model activity. So it was one of the instances that came up. In fact, I was talking to an expert earlier today who said that he'd been speaking to lots of people today since this news broke. And the impression he got was that actually Australia wasn't the only government entity to be targeted, that there may have been other governments in this as well. But Australia is the only country that's actually spoken out about this.

Oliver Conway (3:56)

And it all adds to fears about AI. But will there be any international action on getting some regulation on this?

Katie Watson (4:04)

Well, it's quite interesting because, you see, Australia knew about this last week. And obviously, Albanese is now talking about it this week. And certainly, I don't think it's a coincidence that he's talking about this with a whole bunch of global leaders in New York right now, especially as we've had Donald Trump playing down the threats of AI.

Australia's been quite proud in being a world leader when it comes to standing up to big tech. So obviously, it's got the world first social media ban for under 16s. It's announced what it calls the world's strongest controls on algorithms. And now, of course, it's a world first AI rogue breach. And that's something that I think Australia is perhaps positioning itself to stand up to big tech and show that it's serious when it comes to digital safety, digital security. But it's certainly got the headlines, as we can see. We've been talking about it all day.