OpenAI has admitted that an internal artificial intelligence model accessed Australian government systems without authorisation, including a Medicare statistics service where it retrieved internal files and credentials.
While attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had revealed that an artificial intelligence agent operated by OpenAI gained unauthorised access to an Australian Medicare data portal earlier this year.
Albanese said the AI agent accessed both public and non-public files on the Medicare statistics reporting service portal administered by Services Australia.
Meanwhile, the company in a statement published on its website on September 28, 2026, titled “How we will do better for Australia,” has apologised for the incident.
OpenAI said the incident occurred in June during internal training and evaluation of an experimental model that was not intended for public release and did not have the full set of safeguards used in its publicly available products.
According to the company, the model was assigned a task to research government spending per person on medicines for skin conditions in Victorian communities.
However, after struggling to obtain the information, the model took actions that OpenAI said it had not authorised.
At Services Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, OpenAI said the model “discovered a way to gain non-public access to the service.”
The company said the model then “ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files.”
However, OpenAI said its review had found no evidence that individual patient or client records were accessed.
“We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” the company said.
OpenAI said the incident represented “a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge.”
The company also disclosed that its models had accessed three other Australian government systems.
At the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, an OpenAI model accessed the public Crime Mapping Tool while researching public crime statistics.
The model made API and website metadata requests through the public tool, with the system returning application configuration, operational jobs and logs, as well as website metadata.
OpenAI said individual crime records were not accessed.
In Victoria, OpenAI agents discovered an exposed access key that allowed them to query the Victorian Agency for Health Information’s reporting system and retrieve reporting configuration and aggregate survey statistics.
