Amid a global call for the slowdown of artificial intelligence, Australia has confirmed that an OpenAI agent “infiltrated” its health and Medicare records earlier this year, making the first-known AI hack of a government system.
In a briefing on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, prime minister Anthony Albanese added that despite being raised with the artificial intelligence company, OpenAI “took way too long to inform the government of what had occurred. As per Albanese, the hack occurred when OpenAI’s research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into public medicine spending. “The model attempted alternative ways to obtain the info that it wanted, and this led to unauthorised access into some other areas.
It accessed public and non-public information within the portal, and Services Australia also advises that it engaged, in order to do this, it engaged in writing files as well to the internal server,” he said in a press conference. Drew Pusateri, the spokesperson for OpenAI, said that the company carried out extensive checks into its AI models’ activity after the incident was flagged to them in August.
“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.
In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” Pusateri said in a statement, as per CNN The artificial intelligence company further stated that it found “no evidence” of the AI agent accessing patient records in the Medicare breach.
