OpenAI says its review into hacks, including on Australian government sites, is costing $500,000 a day

OpenAI says its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face agent attacks is costing the company more than US$500,000 per day, as it deploys AI to examine data that would take a human 66m years to read.

The company has warned the review is ongoing, and more organisations may be informed they’ve been targeted in the near future.

On Friday evening, OpenAI revealed agents had hacked into a New South Wales government website in June and accessed historical non-public data on bushfires without authorisation.

It is the sixth government website in Australia to be notified by the AI giant since last month of agent activity on their services, after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced OpenAI’s agents had hacked into Services Australia’s Medicare statistics portal.

The reason for the delay compared to the revelation of the Medicare attack is due to the sheer volume of data OpenAI needs to review.

In a blog post this week the company revealed the large amount of work involved in reviewing its agents’ activity.

OpenAI said it has to review 50 petabytes of data – roughly 50m gigabytes.

“We’re working back through the records month by month, looking for potential unintended activity beyond the cases we’ve already found,” the company said.