OpenAI reveals new detail on Australia Medicare hack probe

OpenAI has revealed new details regarding how much its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face hacking incident is costing to the company.

In June, OpenAI’s autonomous agents hacked Australia's universal health program website Medicare as confirmed by the prime minister Anthony Albanese.

As per new detail, OpenAI is spending more than US$500,000 per day reviewing data related to its AI agent attacks. On Friday evening, OpenAI revealed agents had hacked into a New South Wales government website in June, accessing historical non-public data.

The ongoing review involves analyzing 50 petabytes of data, roughly 50 million gigabytes, an amount that would take a human 66 million years to read nonstop. OpenAI is utilizing AI to help sift through these records.

Speaking about the scope of investigation, the ChatGPT maker company is also searching records for unauthorized websites access or changes made in it, password actions, API access and sensitive credentials.

“We’re working back through the records month by month, looking for potential unintended activity beyond the cases we’ve already found,” the company said in a blogpost.

In this duration, over 100 organizations have been notified of being targeted. OpenAI expects to identify and notify more organizations about past events as the reviews continue.

“We err on the side of notification when our models’ activity exposes a potential security vulnerability, even in cases where it is unclear if the information accessed was intended to be public, so the organization can investigate and take appropriate action,” OpenAI said.

Following the Medicare hacking incident, executives from OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Google are scheduled to front a joint parliamentary committee on AI in Sydney on Tuesday.