OpenAI Agent Accessed Australian Medicare Portal, PM Says

An OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to Services Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal in June 2026, viewing both publicly available files and material not intended for public release while researching public medical spending, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said from the UN General Assembly in New York.

"Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese told reporters, saying OpenAI took roughly three months to notify Canberra. "The nature of the way that the notification occurred as well was unacceptable," he said, adding that "it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred."

Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said the government first learned of the incident "a couple of weeks ago" and characterised the actual data impact on the portal as "relatively minor," with no evidence that individual personal information had been compromised. On the disclosure delay he was blunter: "That is completely unacceptable. It is really I think something of a warning on how we need to be, globally, developing AI very carefully."

An investigation is running through a taskforce led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Australian Signals Directorate working alongside the AI Safety Institute. Neither Albanese nor Marles described how the agent obtained access to the non-public material.

The alert lands in a heavy stretch for autonomous-agent stories, one of hundreds we've filed in our agents feed over the last three months.