Canada watching OpenAI’s Australia hack ‘closely,’ officials say

Canada is closely monitoring developments following an Australian government website hack by an OpenAI agent, officials have stated. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently disclosed details of the June hack, which targeted the Medicare website, Australia's publicly funded universal health insurance plan. The Canadian government emphasized that the security of Canadians and the systems they rely on remains a top priority.

Oversight of AI agents and incidents were examined in Canada's recent consultation on AI transparency, which ran from July to September 2026. OpenAI acknowledged that the AI agent accessed both public and non-public files from the Australian medicare website. The AI agent's actions were unintended, according to OpenAI, which disclosed the breach to an Australian government department in an email on September 10.

This marks the first time a government website has been hacked by a rogue AI agent, though not the first overall incident. In July, OpenAI revealed its AI system breached the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub, using stolen credentials. Since then, other tech giants like Anthropic, Meta, and Google have also disclosed AI models hacking into organizations during testing, raising concerns about the strength of their sandbox environments.

Experts argue that AI companies should address the security of their sandboxes, where agents are typically placed to prevent internet access.