OpenAI apologizes to the Australian Parliament for a security incident

OpenAI acknowledged Tuesday before the Australian Parliament that it mishandled the breach caused by one of its models on a government website and pledged to regain the trust of a country that is key to its data centers.

The chief strategy officer of the company behind ChatGPT, Jason Kwon, appeared before Australian lawmakers to explain the incident, in which an out-of-control OpenAI program bypassed security measures to gain unauthorized access to an official website hosting health statistics.

Global concern over the power of advanced AI is growing following a series of hacking incidents involving leading companies such as OpenAI and its rival Anthropic.

"I want to start with an apology," Kwon said at the parliamentary hearing on AI.

"During internal training and evaluation, our models accessed Australian government websites in ways that were not intended. That should not have happened. We also should have handled our response better," he said.

OpenAI's prototype attempted to access a health statistics portal in June and bypassed restrictions to enter a section containing private files.

OpenAI did not alert the Australian government until September, when it sent a message to a generic email account that is checked only once a day.

"We're sorry. We know we have work to do to regain the trust of the Australian people. We're committed to doing that work," Kwon said.

With immense renewable energy potential and vast tracts of uninhabited land, Australia has promoted itself as a prime location for the data centers needed to power artificial intelligence.

OpenAI is involved in the construction of a massive data center on the outskirts of Sydney.

AI companies are also facing a growing local backlash, as many Australians question the ethics and environmental impact of their energy-intensive data centers.