Australia summons Altman, Amodei after OpenAI hacked Medicare site

An Australian Senate inquiry has asked Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to testify October 1, after an OpenAI agent accessed Australia's Medicare portal in June, TheNextWeb reported.

Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator who chairs the inquiry into AI and data centres, said the two chief executives' public warnings about AI risk sit awkwardly next to their companies' push for looser rules on training data. "If they truly believe their own warnings they must front up ... and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like," she said, according to TheNextWeb.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent reached the Medicare statistics portal in June while hunting for public health-spending data, and that OpenAI took almost three months to report the breach. Environment Minister Murray Watt called the company's conduct "completely unacceptable," TheNextWeb reported.

The request is voluntary, though the inquiry can compel the pair to appear if they decline. TheNextWeb reported that OpenAI and Anthropic are separately negotiating with Australia's Labor government for greater access to local content in exchange for a bigger local presence. A separate, Labor-led committee has not asked either executive to testify, TheNextWeb said.