OpenAI admits response to Australian government hacks 'not good enough'

OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon faced a parliamentary hearing into AI in Sydney

OpenAI has admitted its actions were "not good enough" after one of its rogue agents breached Australian government websites in June, saying it had added more precautions to its training environments.

"We are sorry and we know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people," Kwon said.

When asked why OpenAI had not directly contacted government ministers immediately after it found out about the breaches, Kwon acknowledged it was a mistake.

"The reason why it happened the way that it did is I think people were thinking about this as a technical situation and they wanted to contact the technical counterparties, but it's not good enough."

"Even if we don't fully understand the situation, we are just going to notify and start working through the situation collaboratively with the impacted party."

The company was also establishing a local taskforce in Australia to investigate "how to better manage the risks associated with increasingly capable AI", it said.

This meant that OpenAI had been able to alert the New South Wales government to another hack last week within 48 hours.

"We were trying to come up with a standard to apply to our voluntary actions… Based on our learned experience here, we should have been probably talking to more people about how to do that well."

"We haven't found anything like this and we have looked," he told the committee.

An opt-out model - where the onus would be on the artist to ask AI not to use their material for training purposes - was flawed and could mean artists do not get paid for their content, the committee heard.

Anthropic's special envoy Jeff Bleich told the hearing the company had "never tried to dictate" to Australia on its copyright laws.