Australia’s sensitive government information is kept in a secure “fortress”, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said, seeking to reassure the public after an OpenAI model gained unauthorised access to a government health data portal.
Marles said the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s intelligence and cyber security agency, was responsible for protecting the government’s most sensitive information and that such systems were subject to constant security checks.
“The kind of national security, really sensitive information, that we have as a nation, we keep inside a fortress,” Marles said in an interview on Sunday.
The comments followed revelations that an OpenAI agent had accessed public and non-public files on a Services Australia portal containing Medicare statistics. The government has said no personal Medicare information was accessed.
Bloomberg reported that Marles described the incident as a significant warning, while stressing that the compromised portal did not have the same level of protection as systems holding Australia’s most sensitive national-security information.
OpenAI has since disclosed that its models also accessed publicly available information on US government websites, including the Census Bureau and Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it had notified dozens of organisations, including governments and universities, whose websites may have been affected.
Marles said Australia needed to engage with the technology rather than avoid it, arguing that the incident highlighted the need to shape how increasingly autonomous AI systems are developed and governed.
The Australian government is continuing to examine the breach, including how the AI agent bypassed existing controls and why the incident was not reported until months after it occurred.
