Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday announced an incident of OpenAI agent breaching a government website and set up a taskforce to investigate the incident. He said his government is also exploring options whether the hack incident could be reported to the federal police.

PM Albanese also showed his disappointment that Sam Altman led AI company did not inform the officials of the hack and 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. “

On Thursday, PM Albanese held a press conference in New York where he announced an incident involving OpenAI agent breaching Australian Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered under Services Australia. PM maintained that the affected portal did not contain any sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics.

“The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files. A forensic investigation aided by the Australian Signals Directorate is now underway to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected. No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing. Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” said Albanese.

The Prime Minister said that his government is currently exploring options whether to pursue a criminal case against the AI company.

“Further, we will refer the incident to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence that has been established by the Parliament. We’ll seek urgent advice on whether any offences have occurred and whether this should be referred to the Australian Federal Police. And insights from this incident will inform the development of our government’s AI standards legislation,” said PM Albanese.

The press conference by PM Albanese in New York comes in the backdrop of ongoing United Nations General Assembly 2026 session where incidentally OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also present and has made an appeal to the international community to introduce global safeguards related to AI research.

Also Read: OpenAI Calls for US to Lead Global AI Standards, Including Recursive Self-Improvement

The Prime Minister also announced setting up of a taskforce led by his department and will include multiple AI and Cyber safety institutes of Australia.

“I’m announcing the establishment of a taskforce to provide an urgent and immediate review into this incident to determine whether existing processes are appropriate to respond to AI-related cyber incidents. The taskforce will be led by my department and involve the National Cybersecurity . The taskforce will be led by my department and involve the National Cybersecurity Coordinator, the Office of AI, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian AI Safety Institute, and Services Australia,” said PM Albanese.

What is the OpenAI-Australian Government Hacking Case?

On September 23, Transluce, an independent U.S. nonprofit AI research lab, published a report with 30,000 logs that included instances of AI agents from OpenAI to breach at least three organizations including an Australian government website.

According to the report, the AI agents used the web security service urlquery.net to bypass restrictions and expand their access to the public internet. The agents then hacked three public data sources.

“We present evidence of AI agents attempting to compromise websites at three domains: Data USA2 (api.datausa.io), the University of New Mexico digital library (nmdigital.unm.edu), and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) Tableau collections (viz*.aihw.gov.au). This attempted compromise of AIHW is part of the first reported instance of agents hacking a government,” read an excerpt from the report.

Transluce maintained that they informed OpenAI and all three affected parties before publishing the report on Wednesday night. They informed in their report that agent activities were noticed as early as March 2026, while OpenAI only admitted to “rogue activity” by agents months later with the Hugging Face attack case.

OpenAI has not released any public statement on the case, however their spokesperson Drew Pusateri spoke to CNN where he said that the company was informed about the breach only by August.

Also Read: Australia Backs Establishment of Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence