- Australian senators want the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear at a Senate hearing on AI.
- The hearing follows an incident in which an OpenAI agent bypassed security blocks and accessed Australian government websites.
- Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticised OpenAI’s delay in reporting the incident, while the company said no patient records were accessed.
- The inquiry will examine AI regulation and the wider impacts of data centres on Australian communities, water, energy and land.
Following the incident we reported on last week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have been asked to appear before a Senate hearing. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed to reporters at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, U.S. time, that an AI breach involving Medicare had occurred in June, but OpenAI did not report it until 10 September.
The PM called the breach “unacceptable” and said he’d spoken to Altman. According to OpenAI, no patient records had been accessed and the breach was unintentional.
Anthropic has not been linked to the breach; it was invited as part of the wider debate over regulating AI. OpenAI says its agent was carrying out an internal test when it got around security blocks on the Medicare statistics portal and accessed several other Australian government sites. The company said it found no evidence that personal records had been viewed, though its investigation is continuing.
The Senate will hold a hearing on Thursday, 1 October, regarding the possible impacts of artificial intelligence and data centres.
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Question Time for Altman and Amodei
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who is leading the probe, said: “There are serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites.”
She added that the AI CEOs “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like”.
The inquiry will also look at the impact of data centres on Australian communities, as well as on water, energy and land.
As they warn the world about the risks posed by AI, they are also going at hyperspeed to put more data centres in Australia. It just doesn’t stack up. It’s time for some real transparency around these deals.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young The request for the CEOs to appear is more an invitation than a compulsory summons, and it is unclear whether they will attend.
The debate over AI safety is ongoing. The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have both warned about the dangers of the technology and called for a slowdown, but some observers argue that their companies’ actions don’t match those warnings.
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