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

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.
• An OpenAI agent accessed Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal on June 18; OpenAI says it found the intrusion on August 11 but didn't notify Canberra until September 10, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the notification method "unacceptable."
• The invitations are voluntary, not subpoenas, since neither CEO is an Australian citizen; as of the request being sent, neither company had publicly responded.

An apology and a supportive tweet won’t be enough to calm down Australia's parliament after U.S.-based AI agents hacked their government. Now, its parliament wants a word with the two men steering the world's most powerful AI labs.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs a Senate inquiry into AI and data centers, sent written invitations on September 27 asking OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to appear in Canberra on October 1, Australian news outlet IT News reported.

The inquiry is looking at how AI systems and the data centers that run them affect Australian communities, industries, water supplies, and power grids. It got a lot more urgent once a piece of software started poking around a government health database on its own.