OpenAI’s hack of Medicare suggests safeguarding civilisation is the task facing leaders in this new era.
More than 130 world leaders arrived on the United Nations headquarters in New York this week, joining the pageantry and speechmaking of the annual general assembly.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Dario Amodei of Anthropic gave briefings on the safety of artificial intelligence on Wednesday, as a nervous world watched on.
Speaking in the room where some of the biggest questions to face humanity have been deliberated on since the end of the second world war, Altman said the world faced a choice.
The words rang hollow less than 24 hours later, when Altman was the subject of a phone call from Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, after revelations a rogue OpenAI agent had hacked into sensitive Medicare systems in Australia.
The hack happened in June, but it took OpenAI executives until September to alert Services Australia that statistical data on Medicare use had been accessed.
Despite the company’s corporate might OpenAI deemed it appropriate to send an email to a public-facing Australian government address to raise the alarm, months after the hack.
Because the public inbox is checked routinely only once a day, the email was first read by staff within Services Australia on 11 September. Then on 22 September, public servants asked OpenAI for more information about the scale of the hack.
Behind closed doors Xi proposed continuing a dialogue with Trump to prevent AI “misuse and abuse”, while ahead of an expected drubbing in the November midterm elections, Trump said AI “concerns the future of humanity”.