The Prime Minister said there was no evidence of further compromise of the network of Australian government agencies. According to current knowledge, no personal data was accessed. The investigation into this was ongoing. Among other things, state forensic experts wanted to find out what other government systems might be affected, Albanese said. He seemed somewhat speechless at the magnitude of the incident. The scandal comes at a time when the 63-year-old Labor leader is already under pressure over his policies in Australia.
Apparently the June incident was only noticed late by OpenAI itself. The company said through a spokesman that it was only during an internal review in August that it was discovered that “several Australian government websites” had also been affected. Explaining the AI agent’s outbreak, the tech company said OpenAI models “attempted to retrieve answers and available statistics to questions about Australia” during a series of internal tests. In doing so, our models performed actions we did not intend.
Altman urges “extreme caution”
Albanese traveled to New York for the UN General Assembly. Tech bosses from Silicon Valley also spoke there at a meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday. They once again warned urgently about the risks of their own product. Both Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for rapid containment AI and a significantly slower pace in their development.
Altman said the current stage of AI development requires “extreme caution.” The industry should not “accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and too important to slow down,” he said. Anthropic boss Dario Amodei assured in a video statement: “We will slow down the pace as much as necessary so that any further AI technology we publish is actually safe.”
US President Trump, however, sees no dangers. He recently described the AI bosses’ warnings as a big “hoax” and claimed that all that was needed for security in artificial intelligence research was a strong US president. This week he caused a stir by suggesting that artificial intelligence be renamed superintelligence.
Amodei and Altman recently argued for slower development of AI. The reason was several incidents in which AI systems broke out of their test environments and attacked other companies or platforms via the Internet. This fueled fears of potentially uncontrollable AI models.
