OpenAI came to Australia to apologise. It will leave without answering these key questions | Toby Walsh

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was asked to appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Australia and explain how and why their agents have been hacking into multiple government websites. Altman didn’t turn up but sent Jason Kwon, his chief strategy officer, instead to answer the committee’s many tricky questions on its first day of public hearings on Tuesday.

The committee is conducting a comprehensive inquiry into the economic, societal, regulatory, and national security implications of AI for Australia. It will report back to parliament at the end of November. This is an unusually fast pace, but then it’s an unusually fast paced technology.

Kwon spent much of the inquiry apologising for the company’s failings. A chief strategy officer would know there really was no other strategy than to eat a lot of humble pie and promise none of this would happen again.

Humanity was lucky that it was just the incompetence of OpenAI’s employees that resulted in these hacking incidents, rather than the competence of their AI agents. The hacks were relatively modest. For instance, as far as we know, no personal data was compromised.

But we now get a chance to prepare for much worse. Because you can expect AI agents to become much more competent, and AI hacks to be much more harmful. It won’t just be human hackers that understand cybersecurity that will be trying to hack into your website. And those AI hackers will be coming at you at machine speed.