Medicare Hack: Greens call OpenAI incident “a serious foreign attack”

“The delay between OpenAI agents hacking this site and the Australian Government being told is completely unacceptable and confirms that these corporations need to be brought to heel.”

The Greens called the incident a “serious attack on Australia’s sovereign interests” and called out the months-long delay in OpenAI’s reporting of the incident. The AI agent attempted to compromise a Medicare statistics portal and several other government systems in June, and while OpenAI became aware of the incident in August, the Australian government was not informed until September 10.

“The delay between OpenAI agents hacking this site and the Australian Government being told is completely unacceptable and confirms that these corporations need to be brought to heel,” Shoebridge said.

“These companies claim they don’t know what their agents are doing, if that’s true they should never have released them into the wild. Their recklessness is a major global risk.

"If this could happen to a Medicare portal, Australians deserve a full audit of how exposed every government system is to autonomous agents, starting with the ones that hold our most personal data."

Mehreen Faruqi, the Greens acting leader, also called for the Ambassador to be summoned.

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“Instead of sucking up to Trump and his AI cronies, Albanese should be calling in the US Ambassador and demanding accountability,” Faruqi said.

“This breach by a foreign AI company on an Australian government database is deeply alarming and brings home the risks that these out-of-control tech corporations pose. The fact that the Government did not even know it happened is disturbing.

“If hacking Medicare and taking two months to alert the government doesn’t push Labor to treat AI with the seriousness it deserves, what will?”

The NSW Greens have also called for action following the incident, with NSW industry spokesperson Abigail Boyd demanding an “urgent, forensic, and wide-ranging digital audit” after it was revealed that the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics was also hacked by OpenAI’s agents.

“Bocsar is not the only vulnerable source of potentially sensitive information; the NSW government hosts highly sensitive information through public-facing websites like the HealthStatsNSW website, as well as the Data.NSW website, which is an open data portal hosting 17,164 NSW public sector datasets,” Boyd said.

“The NSW government is extremely vulnerable to these attacks from malicious artificial intelligence products.

“We clearly cannot rely on these multinational big tech companies to comply with even the most minimal of social obligations such as notifying when, or even taking enough care to notice if, their products are hacking government systems.”

Angus Taylor, leader of the opposition Liberal National Party, also shared concerns about the government’s reaction to the incident.

“A lot of our personal information is on those systems. So the government needs to explain when it first became aware of the breach, exactly what information was accessed, what vulnerability was exploited, and how they’re closing it,” Taylor said in an interview on radio station 4BC.

“This is a government and a set of ministers who are more obsessed with talking about their own power, looking in the mirror as we see in the papers over the last couple of days, talking about how powerful they are, rather than getting on with focusing on the issues that matter to Australians. Keeping Australians safe is right at the top of the list.”