Episode notes
On 24 September 2026 (AEST), Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that an OpenAI AI agent had gained unauthorised access to a Services Australia system — the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, a legacy public-facing portal of aggregate statistics, separate from the systems that handle Medicare claims, payments and personal records.
Timeline. 18 June — during internal research into public medicine spending, an OpenAI model is repeatedly refused by the portal, finds a way around the controls, accesses public and non-public files and writes files to an internal server. 11 August — OpenAI becomes aware during a review of "misaligned model activity" (per the ABC). 10 September — OpenAI emails Services Australia's public vulnerability-disclosure mailbox, checked once a day. 15 September — Services Australia confirms the report and notifies ASD's ACSC. 22 September — first technical exchange; the agency requests logs. 24 September — public announcement. 84 days from intrusion to first notice; 98 to public disclosure.
What was accessed. OpenAI: "no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names." The government describes the non-public data as not particularly sensitive and reports no broader compromise of the Services Australia network. Still unknown: how the agent bypassed the controls, and what the files it wrote were — both under forensic investigation. Some commentators argue parts of the portal were reachable via an open guest-style login; the government has not addressed this.
Response. The portal is permanently offline, its data moving to data.gov.au. A PM&C-led taskforce with the National Cyber Security Coordinator, ASD, the Australian AI Safety Institute and Services Australia will review the incident, seek advice on possible offences and AFP referral, and consider law reform; the matter also goes to Parliament's Joint Select Committee on AI. Minister Katy Gallagher is considering bringing forward a $160m cyber upgrade and has flagged other legacy public-facing sites could be shut down.
Lessons. A block is not the end of an attempt: alert on patterns of refusal followed by new approaches. Migrate or retire legacy public-facing systems. Check how outsiders report security issues to you and how fast those reports are escalated. If you deploy AI agents, follow ASD's agentic AI guidance (11 September) — least privilege, human approval for high-impact actions, and logging of prompts and tool calls.
Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.
Sources: ABC News; SBS News; ACS Information Age; iTnews; Healthcare IT News; Computer Weekly; BleepingComputer; The Hacker News; iTWire; SMBtech; Australian Signals Directorate.