Prime Minister of Australia : ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Thanks for joining me. I want to update Australians on an incident in which an artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian Government website. This incident occurred in June of this year and involved an OpenAI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered by Services Australia. The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files. A forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is now underway to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected. The Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal is a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending. No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing. Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.
And today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident. And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the Government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable. Today, I’m announcing the establishment of a taskforce to provide an urgent and immediate review into this incident to determine whether existing processes are appropriate to respond to AI-related cyber incidents. The taskforce will be led by my department and involve the National Cybersecurity Coordinator, the Office of AI, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian AI Safety Institute, and Services Australia. And we will release – Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles and Katy Gallagher will hold a media conference soon this morning and release the terms of reference into the review. The report will consider also possible law enforcement and legislative responses and how to ensure that incidents like this don’t happen again. Further, we will refer the incident to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence that has been established by the Parliament. We’ll seek urgent advice on whether any offences have occurred and whether this should be referred to the Australian Federal Police. And insights from this incident will inform the development of our government’s AI standards legislation.
Press conference – New York
