Last week, when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the world that an OpenAI agent had accessed « non-public files » from his country’s Medicare statistics portal during testing, his description of the incident was a little light on details. Today, we’re getting new information on just how far OpenAI’s overzealous agent went in attempting to satisfy a rather innocuous-sounding informational prompt.
In a newly published blog post, OpenAI says the June incident started when the company asked « an experimental, internal-only OpenAI model » to research government spending statistics in the Australian state of Victoria. When the model ran into trouble finding that data using the publicly published statistics that it was supposed to reference, « it took actions that we had not authorized it to take » to find an answer, OpenAI said.
Those unauthorized actions included finding « a way to gain non-public access to the service » and using that access to view « technical system information and source code » alongside credentials and the aggregate statistics it was actually searching for, OpenAI said.
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