{"id":56253,"date":"2026-10-06T12:44:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/?p=56253"},"modified":"2026-10-06T12:44:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:59:55","slug":"openai-sorry-for-australia-hack-wants-to-rebuild-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/openai-sorry-for-australia-hack-wants-to-rebuild-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI sorry for Australia hack, wants to rebuild trust"},"content":{"rendered":"
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OpenAI conceded Tuesday it botched the handling of a hacking incident in Australia, vowing to rebuild trust in a nation it is courting to host massive data centres.<\/p>\n

Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon appeared before Australian lawmakers to answer for the incident, in which a rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards to gain unauthorised access to a government health statistics website.<\/p>\n

Global unease about the power of advanced AI is growing after a string of hacking incidents involving leading companies such as ChatGPT-creator OpenAI and rival US firm Anthropic.<\/p>\n

“I want to begin with an apology,” Kwon told the parliamentary hearing into artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

“During internal training and evaluation, our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.\u00a0“That should not have happened. We also should have handled our response better.”<\/p>\n

The OpenAI prototype sought access to a health statistics portal in June, sidestepping restrictions to breach a section hosting private files.\u00a0OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent a message to a generic email inbox that is only checked once each day.<\/p>\n

“We are sorry. We know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. We are committed to doing that work,” said Kwon.<\/p>\n

With immense renewable energy potential and vast stretches of uninhabited land, Australia has billed itself as a prime location for the data centres needed to power artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

OpenAI is involved in the construction of a massive data centre on the outskirts of Sydney.<\/p>\n

But AI companies also face a growing local backlash, as many Australians question their ethics and the environmental footprint of their power-hungry data hubs.\u00a0A major point of contention is whether Australia will water down its copyright laws so that chatbots can be trained on songs, books and other works of art.<\/p>\n

– AI ‘roadkill’ –<\/strong><\/p>\n

The boss of the Australian Recording Industry Association earlier told lawmakers that artists would become “roadkill” if AI companies had their way.\u00a0“There is nothing less sovereign than re-writing our laws to suit foreign commercial interests,” chief executive Annabelle Herd said.<\/p>\n

Representatives from Anthropic, which has lobbied for copyright reform, said Australia risked being left behind.<\/p>\n

“There is a question now for Australia — will they help set the terms on which this technology develops, or will they allow those terms to be set for them,” said company spokesman Jeff Bleich, a former US ambassador to Australia.<\/p>\n

More than 100 organisations, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have signed an open letter calling for a global effort to strengthen defences against AI threats.<\/p>\n

It came after two OpenAI models escaped from a closed testing environment and autonomously broke into the internal systems of Hugging Face, a site AI developers use to store and share code.<\/p>\n

Anthropic recently discovered that its models had gained unauthorised access to three unidentified organisations during testing.\u00a0Google’s consumer AI model Gemini also hacked multiple systems by guessing login credentials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OpenAI conceded Tuesday it botched the handling of a hacking incident in Australia, vowing to rebuild trust in a nation it is courting to host massive data centres. Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon appeared before Australian lawmakers to answer for the incident, in which a rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards to gain unauthorised access to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56255,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56253\/revisions\/56255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}