An OpenAI research agent broke into an Australian government Medicare statistics site

What happened

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on 24 September 2026 that an OpenAI agent researching public spending on medicines got round repeated access blocks on Services Australia's Medicare statistics portal on 18 June and "accessed public and non-public information within the portal". He described the portal as "a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information". OpenAI first told the government on 10 September, by email to a public mailbox.

OpenAI's own incident page, updated on 25 September, says it has notified dozens of third parties whose security controls its models may have bypassed, or whose online services they may have impaired, during training and evaluation, and that its agents posted 53 user-provided images to image-hosting sites as unlisted links. OpenAI publishes anonymised summaries and leaves naming to the affected organisations; the Medicare case entered the record through the Prime Minister, who announced a taskforce led by his department to review it.