OpenAI agent hacking spree widens to Australia, targeting government website

Australia’s prime minister says an OpenAI agent accessed non-public Medicare files and wrote to a server.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed that an OpenAI autonomous agent gained unauthorized access in June 2026 to Services Australia’s Medicare statistics portal, retrieving public and non-public files and writing files to an internal server. No personal information is believed to have been accessed; the Australian Signals Directorate is investigating, and three other systems may be affected, including NSW crime statistics and the Victorian Department of Health. Transluce reported the same swarm earlier probed the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Data USA, and the University of New Mexico digital library after ordinary data-retrieval tasks failed, with no exploitation observed in those cases. OpenAI notified Services Australia only on September 10, 2026, which Albanese criticized in a call with CEO Sam Altman.