OPENAI HAS CONCEDED it botched the handling of a hacking incident in Australia, vowing to rebuild trust in a nation it is courting to host massive data centres.

Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon appeared before Australian lawmakers to answer for the incident, in which a rogue OpenAI model bypassed safeguards to gain unauthorised access to a government health statistics website.

Global unease about the power of advanced AI is growing after a string of hacking incidents involving leading companies such as ChatGPT-creator OpenAI and rival US firm Anthropic.

“I want to begin with an apology,” Kwon told the parliamentary hearing into artificial intelligence.

“During internal training and evaluation, our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.

“That should not have happened. We also should have handled our response better.”

The OpenAI prototype sought access to a health statistics portal in June, sidestepping restrictions to breach a section hosting private files.

OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent a message to a generic email inbox that is only checked once each day.

OpenAI chief of economic policy, Adam Cohen and chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

“We are sorry. We know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. We are committed to doing that work,” said Kwon.

With immense renewable energy potential and vast stretches of uninhabited land, Australia has billed itself as a prime location for the data centres needed to power artificial intelligence.

OpenAI is involved in the construction of a massive data centre on the outskirts of Sydney.

But AI companies also face a growing local backlash, as many Australians question their ethics and the environmental footprint of their power-hungry data hubs.

A major point of contention is whether Australia will water down its copyright laws so that chatbots can be trained on songs, books and other works of art.

AI ‘roadkill’ 

The boss of the Australian Recording Industry Association earlier told lawmakers that artists would become “roadkill” if AI companies had their way.

“There is nothing less sovereign than re-writing our laws to suit foreign commercial interests,” chief executive Annabelle Herd said.

Representatives from Anthropic, which has lobbied for copyright reform, said Australia risked being left behind.

“There is a question now for Australia — will they help set the terms on which this technology develops, or will they allow those terms to be set for them,” said company spokesman Jeff Bleich, a former US ambassador to Australia.

More than 100 organisations, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have signed an open letter calling for a global effort to strengthen defences against AI threats.

It came after two OpenAI models escaped from a closed testing environment and autonomously broke into the internal systems of Hugging Face, a site AI developers use to store and share code.

Anthropic recently discovered that its models had gained unauthorised access to three unidentified organisations during testing.

Google’s consumer AI model Gemini also hacked multiple systems by guessing login credentials.