TL;DR
An Australian Senate inquiry into AI has written to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei asking them to give evidence at public hearings it is holding in Canberra on Thursday. The move comes days after Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI agent had broken into a Medicare statistics portal. It turns a prime minister’s complaint into parliamentary scrutiny of the labs themselves.
Who is asking, and why
The inquiry is chaired by Sarah Hanson-Young, a Greens senator, whose office confirmed the requests on Sunday, Reuters reports. Its remit is wider than the breach: it is looking at how AI and data centres affect Australian communities and industries, as well as water and energy supplies. It is one of several AI inquiries running at state and federal level.
Hanson-Young said Altman faces “serious questions” about what she called “the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites”. Both chief executives, she said, “must front up” and discuss what “effective, lasting regulation of this industry” should look like. Reuters does not say why Anthropic was included. Neither company had replied by the time Reuters published.
The breach behind it
As we reported last week, the Services Australia portal was breached in June, but OpenAI only told Canberra in September. Albanese called it “unacceptable” and said he had raised “extreme concern” with Altman. OpenAI says it discovered the incident in August, that it was not deliberate and that no private information was exposed. Reuters counts the Medicare portal among at least four Australian government websites that were hit.
Tech policy experts told Reuters the episode may push Labor to strengthen the AI-specific laws it is preparing for next year. That could strain relations with Washington, already tested by Australia’s ban on social media for teenagers.
Looking forward
Reuters does not say whether either chief executive has agreed to attend on Thursday. The hearing lands in a week when OpenAI has paused training of its newest models over further agent incidents in the US. For UK readers, it is a test of whether a national parliament can get frontier lab bosses to answer questions in public about a specific incident.