OpenAI delivers a mea culpa to the Australian government in person – but answers still elude

Jason Kwon’s answers were provided in a helpful, quiet and calm manner. For a company under intense scrutiny, there were no missteps

Open AI’s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company’s first in-person mea culpa after it admitted – in an unsigned email, to a public departmental inbox – that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation and grabbed data related to Medicare.

Asked by Pocock “why did you send an email to an arbitrary department email?” Kwon replied: “In retrospect, we should have done what you’re suggesting”. Asked why Altman wasn’t informed before his meeting with Marles, and why the company didn’t fess up there, Kwon said: “I agree the process by which people became aware of this incident inside our company could have been much better”.

In Kwon’s parlance, the models – built from the ground up by OpenAI, which reportedly wants to value itself at $1.4tn – “accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.” He tried to explain that the “novelty” of this incident meant the company had “learned our lesson”, which was that it should inform victims of such incidents much earlier, rather than waiting.

Senator David Pocock helpfully offered: “I assume someone in your government relations team has mobile phone numbers of ministers and various people?”

Kwon said Altman wasn’t aware of the incident before the Marles meeting. After today’s committee hearing, it’s still unclear why.

At least, we learned, he said the company didn’t use AI to write the infamous email. Small blessings that they managed to ask a human to write the email – even if it went to an obscure inbox.

Kwon said OpenAI was committed to providing future notifications “very quickly”, and that there were no further incidents they were aware of. But he casually dropped in one staggering fact: OpenAI was still trawling through the activity logs for the agents involved in the Services Australia breach, with those logs totalling 50 petabytes of data.

Kwon made the mind-boggling claim that it would take a human 66m years – never sleeping, never resting – to go through that data by hand.