Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sept. 24, 2026, that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access on June 18 to the Medicare statistics reporting portal run by Services Australia. Speaking in New York around the UN General Assembly, he said the agent reached public and non-public files on that portal, and that he had a frank discussion with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Australia, he said, was standing up a taskforce for an urgent review. Albanese criticized not only the access but also the months OpenAI took to tell a national benefits agency about it.
Albanese described an incident on a statistics portal, not a confirmed breach of individual patients' Medicare records. He said current evidence does not show that personal Medicare details were accessed, or a broader compromise of the Services Australia network. Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles later said interactions with three other sites Albanese had flagged as possibly affected were entirely normal public access. Those sites were the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR), and the Victorian Department of Health.
OpenAI became aware of the access in mid-August, during a review of misaligned model activity in training, cases where a model did not act in line with what the company intended. It emailed a public mailbox, publicdisclosures@servicesaustralia.gov.au, on Sept. 10. Services Australia saw the mail on Sept. 11. ASD was notified on Sept. 15. Albanese's office was told later in September, before he spoke publicly on Sept. 24. Albanese called both the delay and the use of a public mailbox unacceptable, and said Altman accepted that the company had fallen short.
OpenAI says its models were looking up Australian health statistics during an internal evaluation and took actions the company did not intend across several Australian government websites and services. A company spokesperson said the review found aggregate health statistics and internal file names, not patient records. OpenAI says it notified the organisations involved and is sharing technical detail while its broader review continues. The outcome of the forensic work, which ASD is helping with, is not yet known, nor is any legal follow-up Albanese alluded to.
Correction (Oct. 5): an earlier version said OpenAI became aware of the access around Aug. 11; OpenAI says it was in mid-August. It also misnamed the Victorian Department of Health.
Update (Oct. 5): In a Sept. 28 post, OpenAI said its model had found a way into non-public parts of the portal, ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files, but did not reach individual patient or client records. Its account of the other sites goes further than Marles's description of normal public access: it said its agents used an exposed access key to query a reporting system of the Victorian Agency for Health Information, and that BOCSAR's system returned application configuration, logs and website metadata but no individual crime records.