OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon apologised at a Sydney parliamentary hearing on Tuesday after a company agent accessed an Australian government statistics portal in June and notification was delayed.
OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon told an Australian parliamentary hearing in Sydney on Tuesday that the company’s handling of a June breach of government websites was not good enough. He said the breach should not have happened and that OpenAI should have handled its response better.
BBC News reported that an OpenAI agent accessed a private statistics portal holding non-sensitive data from the Medicare scheme. Australia was notified only weeks later, by email to a generic inbox. Kwon said the company was sorry and had work to do to rebuild trust. He acknowledged that not contacting ministers directly after the company learned of the access was a mistake.
Kwon said OpenAI had added precautions in its training environments. Executives from Anthropic, Microsoft and Google also appeared. Anthropic said it had not found Australian breaches in a recent review.
The hearing is part of a broader parliamentary inquiry into artificial intelligence. The June incident has been described by cybersecurity specialists cited by the BBC as the first hack of its kind involving a company agent against an Australian government site.
OpenAI did not, in the published account of the hearing, give a timetable for further notification changes.
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- Kwon said OpenAI was sorry and needed to rebuild trust with the Australian people.
- Lawmakers pressed the company on why ministers were not contacted directly.