Anthony Albanese says AI agent “didn’t accept ‘no’ for an answer” about Medicare breach

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed that an OpenAI agent breached Medicare systems in June while at the United Nations in New York advocating tighter international AI rules. The agent reportedly had been assigned to study public medical data but entered an old government statistics site, accessing private statistics rather than personal health records; Albanese said it overcame privacy safeguards. A newly announced taskforce will investigate further; the government was notified only after OpenAI emailed a public mailbox on Sept. 10, about three months later. New South Wales health officials are reviewing whether their systems were also affected, and Premier Chris Minns said agents may have reached Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research information that was not personal but not publicly available. The incident appears to be the first publicly disclosed breach of a government system by an AI agent.