Television Interview, ABC News Breakfast

SUBJECT/S: Artificial intelligence

HOST, STEPHANIE FERRIER: And we now have the Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles, joining us now from Geelong. Thanks for coming on News Breakfast.

ACTING PRIME MINISTER, RICHARD MARLES: It's great to be here.

FERRIER: We seem to have a little bit of a delay, but we'll continue through with that. Firstly to this breaking news about this data breach by an OpenAI artificial intelligence agent into Medicare services portal. Now, what's your reaction to that?

MARLES: Well, obviously this is a situation which is completely unacceptable. And overnight the Prime Minister spoke with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, to express this very clearly. Back in June, an AI model, agents that were part of it, so this is non-human gained unauthorised access into the medical statistics portal of Services Australia. And that alone represents a very serious incident. We became aware of this as government, a couple of weeks ago. Ministers were informed at the end of last week and over the weekend. And you know, over the last few days we've been assuring ourselves of exactly what the impact has been in relation to data and the portal itself. And for what that's worth, that's relatively minor. And so it's important to assure people of that. No personal information has been accessed here. There's no impact on the system. But that said, what we have seen is an unauthorised access into an Australian government website. And that is completely unacceptable. And we've made that clear to OpenAI.

FERRIER: A lot of Australians would be very worried that even though there wasn't personal information here, that there is the possibility that something like this could happen. Isn't this driving home the case for better guidelines? And how can the government protect our sensitive information from being hacked?

MARLES: I mean, I think, I think you make a valid point. The bigger picture here, which is concerning is the need for there to be guidelines, guide guardrails, I should say, and safety measures put in place as this technology is developed. And that's why the Prime Minister, along with other world leaders, has issued a call in New York during the week specifically in relation to that. It is why we are seeing the CEOs of tech companies raise their own concerns to the UN overnight. Why we saw the essay from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, making this point in the last few weeks. I mean, this is a technology which does offer enormous benefits to humanity, but it has to be developed with safety. And what that means is that the guardrails, the safety measures, need to be well ahead of the capability that is being developed. And that's actually what needs to occur here. At our end, what we've done in response to this is establish a task force that will be led by PM&C, which Prime Minister and Cabinet department, which will also look at work with the Australian Signals Directorate, the AI Safety Institute to just examine everything that has occurred here and to understand how what the agent did and how this incursion occurred and what the impact of it has been. And so we will continue to do that work. We are working cooperatively with OpenAI in relation to that. But, you know, fundamentally, this is a very unacceptable situation.

FERRIER: Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles, thank you for that information.

MARLES: My pleasure.