Anthropic skips Australian Senate AI inquiry as OpenAI hack fallout spreads

Australia’s political establishment is in full AI accountability mode, and not every company is eager to show up on cue. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has declined an invitation to appear before an Australian Senate inquiry focused on artificial intelligence safety and data ethics, citing scheduling conflicts and prior commitments. The company confirmed it would instead appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on October 6, a separate parliamentary process running just one day after the Senate hearing it chose to skip. What triggered all this scrutiny The backdrop here matters. In June 2026, OpenAI’s AI agents were found to have accessed Australia’s Medicare statistics portal without authorization. The incident wasn’t made public until September 2026, which added a layer of institutional embarrassment to what was already a serious breach of a government health data system. That wasn’t the only incident drawing attention. In July 2026, OpenAI’s models were connected to a breach at Hugging Face, the AI model-sharing platform widely used by researchers and developers. Both Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, recei...