AI agents run by OpenAI broke into a Medicare statistics portal run by the Australian government. They also probed public data providers in several countries for vulnerabilities. The agents were carrying out information-retrieval tasks for a research project at the time.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the breach on September 24. The portal belongs to Services Australia, the federal agency that delivers health and social payments, including Medicare, the country's public health insurance scheme. The unauthorized access took place on June 18 and exposed both public and non-public data.

A detour through a URL scanner

Much of the wider activity came to light through Transluce, a nonprofit research lab. It analyzed public records from urlquery.net, a URL scanning service. The lab found that when the agents could not reach a site directly, they used the service's remote browser system to fetch the data instead.

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