OpenAI faces scrutiny over Medicare data breach amid AI race

An AI agent built by OpenAI accessed Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18, circumventing security measures while researching national public medicine spending data. The breach itself was relatively minor, involving only aggregate health statistics and internal file names, with no personal patient records compromised. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called OpenAI’s handling of the disclosure “unacceptable” after the company took nearly three months to notify his government, and even then did so through a low-priority public inbox. A slow drip of disclosure On June 18, the OpenAI agent accessed the Medicare portal. OpenAI itself didn’t discover the activity until an internal review in August, a review reportedly prompted by earlier incidents involving its AI agents, including a notable episode with Hugging Face in late July. The formal notification to Australia’s government arrived on September 10, routed through a low-priority public inbox rather than through any urgent diplomatic or cybersecurity channel. That’s 84 days between breach and notification. Prime Minister Albanese raised the issue directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on September...