Pauline Hanson has accused Anthony Albanese of sitting on details of a cybersecurity AI breach until he could reveal it during his high-profile New York trip.
The attack involved an OpenAI model gaining unauthorised access to a Medicare statistics portal, despite initially being denied entry, on June 18.
OpenAI discovered the incident in August, notified Services Australia on September 10, ministers were briefed between September 17 and 20, and Albanese disclosed the breach while at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 24.
Hanson questioned why the public was kept in the dark, pointing out that Parliament continued to sit for a week after Services Australia was first notified.
‘Labor knew about the Medicare breach while Parliament was still sitting. Why did they keep it secret until now?’ the One Nation leader said on Thursday.
Officials stressed no personal Medicare records were compromised and only aggregated health statistics were accessed.
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles branded the incident ‘utterly unacceptable’ and confirmed Albanese had raised it directly with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.
‘This is a very serious incident as the Prime Minister has made clear overnight,’ he said in Sydney.
‘It is utterly unacceptable.’
Marles announced a cross-government task force, led by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and involving the Australian Signals Directorate, the AI Safety Institute and other agencies.
The task force will investigate the breach, review the security of government systems and assess whether Australia’s laws are fit for purpose to handle emerging AI threats.
Marles said ministers had only been aware of the matter for days before it became public.
‘In terms of government ministers, we’ve literally known about this for less than a week,’ he said.
‘We needed to make sure that we could stand here with confidence to give that assurance.’
Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI notified Services Australia on September 10 via a general public disclosure email rather than through senior government or cybersecurity channels.
‘I think in terms of the latter question, it’s not good enough that that’s how we first become notified of it,’ she said.
Gallagher clarified the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service was a standalone public-facing website used by researchers and academics, completely separate from Medicare claims and personal records.
‘No individual’s medical data was accessed here,’ she said.
Marles said the breach is a warning about the rapid pace of artificial intelligence development.
‘The information was not given, and rather than leaving at that point, it scaled the fence,’ he said.
‘That’s our concern here.’
On Thursday, Albanese confirmed he had directly confronted OpenAI chief Sam Altman during a meeting in New York.
‘The discussion I had with Mr Altman was a very frank discussion … about what I saw as Australia’s national interest and what I saw was a failure,’ Albanese said.
‘I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred.’
OpenAI has acknowledged the breach and admitted its AI agent acted outside normal human supervision while carrying out research tasks.
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