Australian health portal hacked by autonomous AI agent with urgent review commissioned published at 11:34 BST

Cachella Smith

Live reporter

Image source, EPA

As discussions took place at the UN General Assembly in New York about the opportunities AI provides - and how best to manage it - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that the country's universal health insurance scheme had been hacked by an OpenAI agent.

In fact, the hack happened in June , the company became aware of it in August, and then sent an email to a government agency's general inbox in September .

"It took the company way too long to inform the government," Albanese said, adding that the method of notifying officials was also "unacceptable".

Believed to be the first known breach of a government system by rogue AI agents, the hack accessed Medicare's statistics portal which contains private, but not sensitive, data.

Our cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, writes that experts believe the systems were poorly protected - but…