OpenAI's breach of Australian health department website prompts rebuke

MELBOURNE, Australia — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday he was extremely concerned about OpenAI 's breach of an Australian health department website that the artificial intelligence company took too long to reveal.

An OpenAI agent infiltrated the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on July 18, he said. The portal hosted aggregate data about health spending and drug subsidies and is popular with researchers and academics. No personal information had been accessed, the government said.

Albanese made the breach public following a telephone conversation with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Both are in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly.

Altman was among heads of major AI firms who in speeches Wednesday pleaded with the United Nations to save the world or at least its people by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing.

"Today I spoke with … Altman to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese told reporters. "I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable."