A breach of Medicare data by an OpenAI bot was not because the government had been slack - instead, it pointed to how quickly the industry was moving, Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher said.
"It's not like we waited for this event before we put a lot of time and effort and investment into safety in the AI world," she told media on Monday.
The government had invested staff in AI work in the communication and industry departments, along with a $160 million cybersecurity package for Services Australia in the last budget.
Senator Gallagher said Services Australia, responsible for Medicare, had all the technical information it needed to investigate the breach but follow-up meetings with OpenAI would happen throughout the week.
The data has been progressively shifted to an open portal, data.gov.au.
It is the first known time an AI agent has acted on its own, without the authority of a parent company, to access an Australian government data system.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended his government's work, saying AI posed a risk the world over, as agents had tried to access data in "all sorts of other places, including the US".
"Artificial intelligence can make an enormous difference. It can boost productivity, can boost economic growth, it can give us health breakthroughs, but we need to make sure that human beings are in charge of this," he said.
Along with the Medicare breach, hundreds of AI agents worked together for months to try to bypass security defences and access Australian Institute of Health and Welfare information, along with NSW crime statistics.
OpenAI has stressed it did not direct its agent to infiltrate the website in order to perform the innocuous research task it had been set.
The bot interacted normally with three Australian federal and state government sites, but broke into the Medicare statistics portal when offered resistance.
A task force set up after the breach to examine AI reporting obligations and Australia's cyber-safety and legal avenues for punishing OpenAI is expected to report in a matter of weeks.
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