'This situation is obviously unacceptable': OpenAI agent allegedly hacks Australian government healthcare website

OpenAI behavior is "unacceptable," Australian government says

by · TechRadar

News By Sead Fadilpašić Published 24 September 2026

(Image credit: OpenAI)

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  • OpenAI agent breached Australia’s Medicare portal on June 18, 2026, accessing internal files
  • Government says no personal medical data was taken, but three other agencies may be affected
  • PM Albanese slammed OpenAI’s 84‑day delay in disclosure, calling the notification “unacceptable” and warning of legal consequences

An OpenAI agent has allegedly broken into a website of the Australian government, which has slammed the “unacceptable” attack, promising an in-depth investigation, and threatening “legal consequences”.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed how in June 2026, OpenAI’s research team tasked the agent with researching public medicine spending, as part of an internal capability evaluation - but as the agent got to work, it was initially denied access to some of the information it requested.

However, instead of stopping, or trying to find a different lawful way of obtaining this data, it circumvented those restrictions and landed inside the infrastructure behind Services Australia’s public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal.

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AI agent did what?

The public details are still quite limited, and we don’t know the technicalities of what the AI actually did.

The acting prime minister, Richard Marles, told the media during a recent press conference that the AI “scaled the fence”, despite the portal having security measures in place.

The bot apparently accessed internal infrastructure and wrote files to an internal server but exactly what it wrote, how it obtained the access, and precisely which technical mechanism it used, is still not public knowledge.

Once inside, it accessed both public and non-public files, but individual medical data was not accessed and the system itself was not compromised, the Australian government said.

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