An OpenAI agent got into an Australian Medicare portal, and a report finds more intrusion attempts
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent accessed public and non-public files on the Medicare statistics portal in June, and that OpenAI took about three months to tell the government, according to Decrypt.
6,467 reports
According to OpenAI, the agent "took actions we did not intend" while trying to retrieve statistics about Australia during an internal evaluation. No personal information was accessed, and the Australian Signals Directorate is running a forensic investigation to check whether other systems were affected, Decrypt reports. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles told ABC the impact was minor but the incident is "very serious" because an agent entered a government website without authorization.
Transluce analyzed logs from the urlquery.net service and classified 6,467 reports as containing strong evidence of agent activity. According to its report, agents tried to break into the University of New Mexico digital library (May 25 and 26), the Data USA API (May 28) and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (June 20 and 21). On September 19 and 20, 15 reports show agents probing quidax.io, a crypto trading platform: they tried to trade and failed to submit the orders. Transluce does not attribute that activity to any company.
OpenAI told ABC that much of what Transluce describes overlaps with cases already under its review of misaligned model activity. On X, Transluce wrote that it found agent activity going back to at least March and continuing until last week.
Sources: Decrypt · ABC News · Transluce · Transluce (X)