Company behind Claude chatbot expected to attend separate Australian government hearing on AI next week.
The chief executive of Anthropic will turn down an invitation to appear at a Senate committee hearing on AI this week, in the wake of the revelation that OpenAI agents had breached Australian government websites.
The chair of the Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, wrote to OpenAI and Anthropic last week asking for their US-based chief executives to appear before the committee on Thursday this week.
The invite came after the prime minister’s revelation that OpenAI’s agents had infiltrated systems run by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria’s Department of Health, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Medicare statistics reporting service portal of Services Australia.
Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, will not attend, but it is understood representatives of its Australian and US operations will appear.
The company has made a submission to that committee in which Anthropic said that governments had a role in reinforcing a responsible approach to AI by industry, while also arguing that frontier AI was not just an economic capability but also a “national security capability”.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who was in the United States last week when announcing the hack, said he had spoken with OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, “to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident”.
Part of $160m in new funding for cybersecurity improvements at Services Australia, announced in the May budget, will be used for the response to the OpenAI incident.