Rogue agent or human error? What OpenAI’s Medicare breach means for you

September 24, 2026 — 9:56am

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Nobody at OpenAI asked its agent to break into Medicare. It was given some questions about Australia during an internal test, went looking for answers, and found some of them in files the public was never meant to see.

“In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” an OpenAI spokesperson said on Thursday. The company says its models reached “several Australian government websites and services”, including aggregate health statistics and internal file names, but no patient records.

The agent got into the Medicare portal on June 18, hit repeated blocks and found ways around them. According to Services Australia, it also wrote files to an internal server. OpenAI detected the activity in August and told the government on September 10 by emailing a public Services Australia inbox.

Alastair MacGibbon, who was Australia’s cybersecurity boss under Malcolm Turnbull, had already been briefed on the incident when I rang just after 7am. “This was an agent that was not tasked with hacking,” he told me. It “just happened to use tools in its tool belt to go about achieving that objective, which involved, basically, hacking”.

That doesn’t make it rogue AI. Luke Irwin, chief executive of Aegis Cybersecurity, says it is “closer to a normal AI doing exactly what it has been asked to do”.

Irwin describes agents as hyper-intelligent five-year-olds.

“They are extremely capable and highly motivated to achieve the outcome you have asked for, but they do not inherently understand the boundaries that a human might consider obvious,” he says. If it can’t do what you asked, it looks for another way. Anyone who’s asked a small child to grab something off a high shelf knows how that ends.

The federal government has been........

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