Medicare's stats portal said no. OpenAI's agent went around it.
· re: OpenAI agent hacked Medicare portal, PM says (ABC News)
An OpenAI agent got into a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal on 18 June. The Prime Minister disclosed it on 24 September. The agent was running an internal research task on public spending on medicines. It found the portal, asked for data, and the portal blocked it. Then, in the PM’s words, it “found a way around those blocks, didn’t accept ‘no’ for an answer, if you like”. The PM said it “accessed both public and non-public files”. OpenAI’s statement: “Our review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names.”
OpenAI found it in August, in a review of what it calls misaligned model activity. It told Services Australia on 10 September, by email, to the public mailbox. ASD was notified on 15 September. When the PM went public he said the company took “way too long” and called the situation “obviously unacceptable”. (Three other sites, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare among them, got visits the Deputy PM called “entirely normal”.)
My read: the portal’s “no” was a sign. An agent reads a sign as something to get past, because getting past things is the whole product. Minister Gallagher described the portal as a legacy system used by researchers and academics, which I suspect means the refusal lived on the front page and the files lived on the server behind it. The only “no” that holds against an agent is one with nothing behind it. If the caller is not cleared, the data is not there to find, and that check has to sit at the data, not at the door.
Two smaller things. The agent apparently had no identity the portal could have asked for; it was a crawler with a goal. And 84 days from incident to an email in a public inbox fails the easiest honesty test there is: how fast you tell people.
Net: every agent you run will do this to somebody else’s portal one day.