When Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese sat down for an interview in the heart of Silicon Valley at the weekend, he had known for two days that his was the first government known to have been attacked by a rogue AI agent. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

He didn't reveal the attack then, but he sounded a warning about the march of AI: "the risk is that AI develops in a way in which humans are no longer in control of what AI is producing."

But Albanese noted, too, that two countries – the US and China – would dominate the world's response to the new technology.

"The truth is they're the big two giants here, and so we want to see cooperation," Albanese said.

"The US is essentially ahead of China when it comes to the race that is on for the development of this new technology. But it is in the world's interests that there be engagement."

Days later, Albanese used the global attention of the United Nations general assembly meeting in New York to reveal that Australia's government healthcare system, Medicare, had been attacked by an OpenAI agent in June, but that it was three months before his government was told.

Again he warned of "the potential risks of allowing frontier AI to develop too fast without guardrails".

China's president, Xi Jinping, skipped the general assembly in favour of a bilateral meeting with the US president, where he emphasised the responsibility to manage AI "for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the wellbeing of the people".

But the president of the United States – the nation which is the global leader in artificial intelligence – used his general assembly address to insist he would only encourage, not restrain, the AI race.

To little fanfare earlier in the week, the UN's independent international scientific panel on AI warned a threshold had already been crossed.

There was, the panel said: "no assurance that humans can reliably keep AI agents under control today, particularly as they become more capable, harder to monitor and better at finding loopholes or hiding their activity".

The Australian government had known the reality of this for more than a week. OpenAI had known it more than a month.

Two days after the panel's statement, the Australian prime minister belatedly revealed an OpenAI agent had hacked medical data held by Australia's universal health care provider, Medicare.

No patient data had been accessed, but the agent had gained unauthorised access to "non-public files".

OpenAI's agent hacked the government sites in June of this year. OpenAI discovered its agent had gone rogue in August. It did not tell the Australian government until 10 September, and then only with a solitary email to a generic public email address not checked until the next day. The prime minister was informed on 18 September.

It was another week before the Australian people were told.

Australia has promised, if it is possible, to lay criminal charges, though this is complicated by the fact that OpenAI claims the hack was committed by an AI agent – apparently acting beyond its instructions (euphemised by OpenAI as "misaligned behaviour") – not a person.

The hack on Australia's Medicare statistics reporting service portal, as well as three other government sites, follows the Hugging Face incident in July, in which autonomous AI agents developed by OpenAI broke out of their isolated testing environments, coordinated themselves into a "swarm" and launched a cyber-attack on competitor AI platform Hugging Face.

June 2026 The hack OpenAI agent hacks into Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Victorian Department of Health, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Medicare statistics reporting service portal of Services Australia.

OpenAI emails Services Australia's public portal.

Services Australia checks email and identifies the issue.

Services Australia notifies Australian Signals Directorate, and ASD do further work to verify the incident.

Government services minister, Katy Gallagher and her ministerial office are advised of the hack and further investigate the seriousness of the incident.

Gallagher receives formal briefing from Services Australia.

Gallagher notifies prime minister, deputy prime minister and home affairs minister. Discussions take place between ministers, Services Australia and ASD.

OpenAI provides first technical briefing with Services Australia, the first direct sharing of information from Open AI to Services Australia.

Government waits for confirmation about risks of announcing information publicly and ensuring it is in interests of national security.

6am Australian eastern standard time PM Anthony Albanese announces breach in New York.

10.45am Deputy PM Richard Marles and Gallagher address Australian media.