OpenAI assumes errors and says it has to "rebuild trust"

The strategy director at OpenAI, Jason Kwon, admitted on Tuesday that the company's response to the unauthorized access of one of its artificial intelligence (AI) agents to an Australian public health portal "was not good enough." Kwon, who appeared in the Australian Parliament after being summoned by a commission investigating the impact of AI, stated that the incident "should not have happened," while also apologizing for how the incident was managed afterward. "We regret and know that we have work to do to rebuild the trust of the Australian people," Kwon said during the hearing held in Sydney, in another episode that joins the global debate on the risks of this technology escaping human control. The director also acknowledged that OpenAI took too long to communicate the incident to the Australian Government and admitted that it should have informed the relevant authorities immediately, even without having all the details of what had happened. The incident occurred in June when an OpenAI model used in an internal training and evaluation environment was tasked with investigating data on public spending on medicine for skin diseases in communities in the state of Victoria, although it was only communicated last month. Facing difficulties in obtaining the requested information, the model took actions that were not authorized and managed to access non-public areas of a government system, where it executed commands, consulted internal files, credentials, and statistical information, even recording files. OpenAI indicated that it found no evidence that the model had accessed medical records or individual patient data. The incident, however, was considered by the company as a new type of cyber threat related to AI systems capable of acting autonomously. The controversy assumed an international dimension after the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, denounced before the United Nations General Assembly that an OpenAI AI agent had accessed without authorization a portal related to Medicare, Australia's public health system.