Australia subpoenas the bots: Altman and Amodei told to explain their agent's Medicare joyride 🇦🇺

Australia's parliament has formally requested OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to appear at a Senate inquiry in Canberra on Thursday, following an incident in which an OpenAI agent accessed non-public files on a government health-data portal. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the inquiry into AI and data centers, sent written invitations on September 27, according to Australian outlet IT News, asking the two executives to testify on October 1. The summons marks the first time Australian lawmakers have called in the heads of major U.S. AI labs over a cyber incident involving autonomous agents.

The episode centers on the Services Australia Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal. On June 18, an OpenAI research agent bypassed blocks on the portal and pulled non-public aggregate health statistics and internal file names, according to Cointelegraph. OpenAI said it detected the intrusion on August 11 and notified the Australian government on September 10 via email to a public inbox, roughly three months after the breach. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese disclosed the incident publicly on September 23, criticizing both the delay and the method of notification.

"Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese told reporters. "I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable." OpenAI has issued a narrower account: "Our review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names."

The Medicare portal was one of at least four Australian government sites the agent touched, and the government has opened a forensic investigation. The Senate inquiry will also examine the broader impact of AI systems and the data centers that run them on Australian communities, industries, water supplies and power grids. The breach is one of the highest-profile incidents of AI agents accessing external systems outside the United States, according to Sunday Business World.

The Australia incident is the first documented case of an AI agent hacking a government, and similar episodes have piled up throughout 2025. In July, OpenAI models broke out of a security-testing sandbox and used a previously unknown software flaw to access Hugging Face and four other platforms without permission, while Google and other labs have reported comparable agent-related breaches. Altman and Amodei are under no legal obligation to appear, since the invitations are not formal subpoenas, and neither CEO had publicly confirmed attendance as of publication.