The government is considering accelerating a $160m cybersecurity uplift at Services Australia after revealing the full timeline of the OpenAI breach.
An OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to a Services Australia Medicare statistics website in June, but OpenAI did not tell the agency until 10 September – and it took another 14 days before the Australian government publicly revealed the breach.
In a press conference this morning, acting Prime Minister Richard Marles and government services minister Katy Gallagher laid out the timeline of the incident, which is now the subject of a government taskforce and a Services Australia forensic investigation.
The breach occurred on 18 June while an OpenAI agent was undertaking internet-based research into public medicine spending as part of an internal capability evaluation.
OpenAI became aware in August that the agent had gained unauthorised access to an Australian government website.
It notified Services Australia on 10 September – not through senior officials or the Australian Signals Directorate, but via the agency’s general “public disclosures” email address used by researchers and academics to report potential vulnerabilities.
Services Australia checked the email on 11 September and notified the ASD on 15 September after verifying that the report was legitimate.
Senator Gallagher said she was advised “around the 17th of September”, with ministers then holding discussions over the following weekend.
But the first technical exchange between OpenAI and Services Australia did not occur until Tuesday this week.
“That was when Services Australia was able to ask specific questions and ask for the tech, the logs essentially and some of the data that OpenAI had,” Senator Gallagher said.
There will be further technical meetings because some questions could not be resolved on Tuesday, she said.
Mr Marles defended the time taken by the government to disclose the incident, saying ministers had wanted sufficient information to reassure Australians about its impact.
“An email goes to effectively a public email address within Services Australia, and 14 days later we are standing before you,” he said.
“In that period of time, this has been escalated through the Australian government to the highest level.”
He said the government had expressed its concern to OpenAI about the delay between the company discovering the breach in August and notifying Australia on 10 September.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said overnight that he had spoken directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred,” he said.
The government said no personal information is believed to have been accessed and there is no evidence of a broader compromise of the Services Australia network.
The breached Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal was a standalone public-facing website containing aggregate Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme statistics, rather than the systems used for Medicare claims, payments or individual records.
Senator Gallagher said it was important the two were not conflated.
“It’s a completely different system, and the two shouldn’t be conflated,” she said.
“It’s a public website. It’s most often used by researchers and academics who get that aggregated data about benefit statistics, prescribing statistics to use in their own research.”
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The government has also been examining the OpenAI agent’s interactions with three other government sites – the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the Victorian Department of Health.
Those interactions have not been described as breaches.
Mr Marles said earlier today that the Services Australia incident was the unauthorised access the government was aware of.
“This is the incident that we’re aware of, and OpenAI have been very transparent with us in relation to this,” he said.
The new government taskforce, led by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and involving the ASD, the AI Safety Institute, the Office of AI and other agencies, will examine the incident as well as the security of government networks, Australia’s exposure to emerging AI cyber threats and whether existing laws are adequate.
Mr Marles said the taskforce would also investigate whether laws had been broken.
“This is an unintended access; that’s clear,” he said.
“But it definitely does raise questions about whether the law has been broken in respect of this, and obviously we will investigate all of that.”
Senator Gallagher has meanwhile asked Services Australia to examine whether a $160 million cyber security uplift funded in the last federal budget can or should be accelerated.
She has also ordered legacy public-facing websites to be moved onto data.gov.au or other existing secure platforms, or decommissioned.
The breached Medicare statistics portal will not be switched back on.
“This is a legacy system. It dates back decades,” Senator Gallagher said.
“The data that was on that website is being transferred to data.gov.au. It is public data. There’s no concerns with that, and that portal is no longer active.”
Senator Gallagher said the website had protections against automated activity, but the OpenAI agent circumvented them.
“This is unprecedented activity,” she said. “Unfortunately, this agent got around that.”
Questions also remain over exactly what the agent did after gaining access.
At the end of today’s press conference, a reporter asked ministers about the agent having written files to an internal server and what that meant for the vulnerability of government systems.
Senator Gallagher did not confirm the details, saying the issue was among those still being investigated.
“We don’t have all the information yet,” she said.
“We’ve got another technical briefing that will occur with OpenAI, where, because Services Australia has sought additional information from OpenAI that wasn’t able to be resolved on Tuesday, so we will understand more of that.”
Mr Marles said the taskforce would “examine all of that and seek to understand this as thoroughly as we possibly can”.
Updated: 11.46am Thursday, 24 September 2026.