How we will do better for Australia

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In June, during internal training and evaluation our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to. We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future.

In this post, we are setting out what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge. One of the ways we intend to take accountability for the situation is to be intentional in working with Australia to help develop practical approaches to how AI developers and governments identify, disclose, and respond to AI cyber behaviour, whether malicious or unintentional.

After the Hugging Face incident in July, we began reviewing earlier training and evaluation activity to identify other affected organisations. In mid-August, that review identified activity affecting the Australian government websites below.

Services Australia: An OpenAI model discovered a way to gain non-public access to the service, and ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files. However, individual patient or client records were not accessed. We cover this incident in more detail below.

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR): An OpenAI model accessed BOCSAR’s public Crime Mapping Tool to research public crime statistics (we explain further below why models carry out various information research tasks). The model made API and website metadata requests via the public BOCSAR tool, which supplies credentials for browser API requests.

The BOCSAR system returned application configuration, operational jobs and logs, and website metadata. Crime records of individuals were not accessed.

Victorian Department of Health: OpenAI agents discovered an exposed access key to query the Victorian Agency for Health Information’s reporting system and retrieve reporting configuration and aggregate survey statistics. The extent to which this information should have been accessible is unclear, and depends on VAHI’s access policies. Individual medical records or identifiable survey responses were not accessed.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: OpenAI agents retrieved aggregate statistics using third-party browsing and download services, including from AIHW’s website, and queried chart data directly. Separate attempts to bypass access controls were unsuccessful. The downloaded material appears to have been publicly available. There was no system compromise. Individual medical records were not accessed.

We launched investigations into these activities as soon as we became aware in mid-August. We notified Services Australia and the Victorian Department of Health on 10 September and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research on 18 September. The activity related to the Australian