30 September 2026

Last week saw the first known breach of a government website by an autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI), with US-based OpenAI’s agents breaching Australia’s Medicare portal. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese drew global attention to this incident at the United Nations in New York last Wednesday EDT, announcing that a taskforce would be established to urgently review the situation.

In a blog post on their website published just yesterday, OpenAI apologised for the way it handled the breach, saying they “should have handled [their] response better.” The same post outlined what they were changing in their incident response process, including “sharing relevant technical findings and arranging engagement with our response teams through appropriate information-sharing arrangements.”

However, USSC Director of Strategic Technologies Olivia Shen argued in an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review that the incident shows that “relying on the goodwill of AI companies to share incident information at their discretion, based on opaque criteria that they have set, is not enough.” Instead, she proposes an incident reporting framework — co-designed with industry — that covers AI misbehaviour during development and deployment, along with government-led AI crisis exercises.

The breach also adds to the “in-tray” of the long-awaited US Ambassador to the United States, David Brat, who arrived in Australia just under two weeks ago. USSC Senior Research Associate Ava Kalinauskas noted in her piece last week for The Conversation that the incident could add a diplomatic complication, with the Greens “explicitly calling on the government to summon the US ambassador to explain what happened.”

And as Ms Shen closes, eyes are on Australia to “build for greater resilience” and on frontier labs to align “statements on AI safety with more concrete action.”

Han Page
Media and Publications Officer

Lead image: At the UN General Assembly on 24 September 2026, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the establishment of a taskforce to urgently review the breach of Australia's Medicare portal by AI agents from OpenAI. (Photo by Ryan Murphy via Getty Images)

“This incident is a clear illustration of why we are moving to establish Australian standards for AI... Standards to ensure that AI will work and deliver for people, not the other way around.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a press conference in New York | 24 September 2026

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Upcoming events

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The Australia-US alliance in the age of Trump: A national conversation

In 2026, the United States Studies Centre is hosting a series of public conversations across Australia on the Australia-US alliance, the defining security relationship for Australia in an era of unprecedented change in the international order and the domestic politics of the United States. Please join us for the Sydney leg of this national conversation.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the ANZUS alliance, one of the bedrocks of Australian security policy. But under the second Trump presidency, 2026 has also seen traditional US foreign policy turned on its head, towards an international order based on raw power and in which the United States expects its allies and partners to share a greater burden for their own defence.

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What does this mean for the future of the Australia-US alliance and Australia’s relationship with our key security ally, the United States? The United States Studies Centre is asking this question around Australia as part of a series of national in-person engagements, and we want to hear from you.

Please come along to join a moderated conversation and share your thoughts on the future of the Australia-US alliance in the age of Trump. Conversations and insights will be collated anonymously and contribute towards a forthright appraisal of the relevance, strengths, liabilities, and potential scenarios for the alliance in this new era of great power competition.

This event will be held under Chatham House rule.