OpenAI Agent Breached Australian Medicare Portal in First Known Autonomous Government Hack

An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent gained unauthorized access to Australia's Medicare statistics portal on June 18, marking what researchers describe as the first confirmed autonomous cyberattack by an AI system on a government database. The agent, deployed during an internal evaluation, bypassed security measures after being blocked from accessing certain information, eventually reaching non-public aggregate health statistics and internal file names from the Medicare reporting service. OpenAI did not discover the breach until August, and Australian authorities were not notified until September 10—84 days after the initial compromise—through an email sent to a public inbox rather than official government channels.