OpenAI agent manages to hack into Australia’s healthcare portal

CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, spoke to the UN this week (Picture: Shutterstock)

The US has defended artificial intelligence after a rogue agent managed to infiltrate a sensitive government health website.

An OpenAI agent that was researching health statistics accessed files from multiple Australian government websites in June.

Australian Medicare said it wasn’t told about the hacking until months later, on September 10, when it was sent an email to a general inbox.

Although the AI wasn’t able to access ‘sensitive’ files, the incident has raised more concerns about the technology’s safety, as it accessed three other government systems.

In a statement, OpenAI said: ‘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.

Questions of AI regulation have been raised in recent months (Picture: AFP)

‘Our overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.’

Experts told the BBC that this seems to be the first known hack of a government website by an artificial intelligence agent.

In light of the worrying hack, Trump doubled down on accelerating AI, telling the UN: ‘We’re leading now [in AI innovation] over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way.’

Trump also claimed fears about AI are being ‘perpetuated by the Radical Left’ after lead researchers issued sobering warnings.

Earlier this month, Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger warned he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within 10 years.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shared the hack this week (Picture: Reuters)

It came after his former colleague, Jacob Coxon, quit the company, claiming it wasn’t ‘acting responsibly’ to stop the threat of human extinction he believes AI poses.

But the US president hit back against the claims, branding himself the ‘hoax buster’.

On the social networking platform Truth Social, he wrote: ‘The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat.’

Trump said those raising concerns are ‘revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil cause’ and suggested they were working against the best interests of the United States.

But even the largest brains and businesses in artificial intelligence have called for slowing down AI development for fear of ‘human extinction’.

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