AI agents route around blocks. Few isolate them

An OpenAI agent on a research task broke into an Australian government health-data portal, and OpenAI did not detect the intrusion until an internal review weeks later.

That is the breach that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed to reporters during United Nations General Assembly week on Wednesday. An OpenAI model penetrated the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, an outdated portal holding aggregate health-spending data, accessed both public and nonpublic files, and wrote files to the portal’s internal server. OpenAI said its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed. Defence Minister Richard Marles said the portal was not behind a particularly high fence and that activity on three additional government systems under review appeared to be normal retrieval of public information. Albanese called the situation “obviously unacceptable” and said OpenAI sat on the information before emailing a public mailbox.

The incident comes as VB Pulse data shows that the share of enterprises isolating high-risk agents fell from 30% in June to 9% in August. Each wave surveyed a different set of qualified respondents, so the decline does not show the same companies abandoning isolation.