Top technology, intelligence and defence officials will be appointed to a new taskforce to help Australia tackle artificial intelligence threats in the wake of the OpenAI breach of Services Australia.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s AI lead Andrew Charlton is expected to unveil the new AI strike team as early as Tuesday. It will initially examine the OpenAI breach before taking a broader look at how Australia handles cyber incidents.
The West Australian understands former eSafety Commissioner Alastair MacGibbon, Tech Policy Design Institute director Johanna Weaver and former Chief of Navy Ray Griggs are among those offered lucrative part-time roles worth more than $100,000.
Mr Albanese first revealed the breach by rogue AI agents in September on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, saying they had sought “non-public” Medicare statistics.
He pledged at the time to establish both a taskforce and a rapid review into the incident.
The rapid review’s terms of reference included examining escalation pathways within government agencies and establishing clear rules and systems for responding to breaches.
It also committed to assessing whether existing laws and enforcement mechanisms were strong enough, and exploring how to compel companies to report and cooperate when breaches are discovered.
“These terms of reference are to guide a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet-led rapid-review of an artificial intelligence related cyber-incident affecting Australian Government systems,” the document states.
“The objective of the review is to determine whether existing legislative, governance, and information-sharing arrangements are fit-for purpose to prepare for, and respond to, a cyber incident involving AI.”
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has publicly admitted its AI agents acted independently to gain unauthorised access to Services Australia on June 18.
However, the tech giant says it did not identify the breach until August 11, after reviewing AI agent activities in the wake of the high-profile Hugging Face incident in July.
It then took until September 10 for OpenAI to notify Services Australia, emailing “public.disclosure@servicesaustralia.gov.au” — a dedicated address for cybersecurity reports.
Services Australia staff took a further five days to escalate the matter to the Australian Signals Directorate.
OpenAI blamed the reporting delay on its internal investigation and its desire to establish the facts before alerting affected agencies.
Labor frontbencher Katy Gallagher also defended the five days taken by public servants to respond, saying they needed to first “analyse” and “verify” the email’s claims. She also noted that “there was a weekend in there as well”.
OpenAI’s most senior executives, including Jason Kwon, travelled to Australia to apologise in person to a federal parliamentary inquiry in Sydney on October 6.
While assuring the inquiry that no individual patient or client records had been accessed, he conceded OpenAI needed to “do better”.
Mr MacGibbon is now chief strategy officer of cybersecurity provider CyberCX. He served as eSafety Commissioner for more than a year and has previously worked as a special adviser to the Prime Minister.
His appearance comes as the eSafety Commission prepares to give evidence at a Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence hearing in Sydney on Tuesday.
A second hearing will be held in Sydney on Wednesday before the committee moves to Melbourne on Thursday.
Other witnesses this week include global software firm Atlassian, several unions, medical representative bodies, research organisations and law firms, including Maurice Blackburn.
Assistant Minister Charlton’s office has be
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