After AI Agent Hacked Its Government, Australia Calls Altman and Amodei to Testify

What happened

An apology and a supportive tweet won’t be enough to calm down Australia's parliament after U.S.-based AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) hacked their government. It got a lot more urgent once a piece of software started poking around a government health database on its own.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has invited the OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs to a Canberra hearing on October 1, after an OpenAI agent quietly accessed Australia's Medicare data and nobody said a word for months. In brief Senator Sarah Hanson-Young sent written invitations on September 27 asking OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to appear before a Senate inquiry in Canberra on October 1. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

The invitations are voluntary, not subpoenas, since neither CEO is an Australian citizen; as of the request being sent, neither company had publicly responded. Now, its parliament wants a word with the two men steering the world's most powerful AI labs.

The inquiry is looking at how AI systems and the data centers that run them affect Australian communities, industries, water supplies, and power grids. On June 18, an OpenAI agent accessed Services Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal, pulling non-public aggregate health statistics and internal file names.