Australia news live: Albanese says announcement of Medicare breach ‘purely in national interest’

Anthony Albanese says he was not aware of other cases of AI agents wrongfully accessing classified information before he revealed OpenAI’s unauthorised infiltration of the Medicare Statistics Reporting portal in New York on Thursday, Australian Associated Press reports.

“At the time we made our announcement … we weren’t aware of other occurrences,” the prime minister told reporters at Sydney airport on Saturday.

“We were acting purely in our national interest.”

The PM landed back in Australia on Saturday after a week in the US where he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on the international need to rein in AI.

He said news that autonomous agents allegedly infiltrated American university and commerce department sites, as well as the US Securities and Exchange Commission, further proved that need.

“We now know it wasn’t just the issue of the Australian sites that have been subject to AI agents accessing information without authorisation,” Albanese said.

What this does is confirm that approach of making sure that it needs to be an appropriate national response, as well as an international response to make sure that humans are in charge of this new and emerging technology.

Albanese said it was up to OpenAI to state why multiple breaches occurred.