OpenAI agents hacked Australian Medicare system | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI agents hacked Australian Medicare system

reuters.com

60 pointsjumploops16 comments

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49822556

This is a failure of journalism. Who hacked into the Australian Medicare system? The fact that they used OpenAI agents is peripheral to the main story.

“Remington guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school” sounds more glaring, and is essentially the same headline.

In this case the analogy seems to be more along the lines of "Remington guns used by Remington employees while testing the safety of their guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school."

Likely, but I am not sure. There were a few well-publicized cases where someone used an AI agent to hack a system. In many cases the exact details were missing. Sometimes it was the creator of the agent. At other times it was an independent lab. In one case it was someone who was tinkering and hacked the appointment system at a gym or something like that to get a better slot.

That's my point. The articles often gloss over or omit who was using the agent and focus on the fact that it was the agent that did the hacking. It's worded to absolve whoever operates the agent, and that is where responsibility ultimately lies.

I think you and I agree. If it was OpenAI employees who did the hacking using their own agent, then the analogy would be like you describe. I wish the article made that clear.

The title should strike the word "agents" from the title. If OpenAI hacked someone, who cares if it was an agent or a human actor. They're accountable for what their software does.

> They're accountable for what their software does.

Sure, but doesn’t it depend on the circumstances?

Sure it does. And if the circumstances indicate that OpenAI committed a crime, they should be held accountable. End of story.

I agree with you right up until “end of story”. Absolutely they should be held accountable, but stories provide details and there is nothing wrong with including details in the title.

Or could we take your original statement to its logical conclusion and change the title to just “OpenAI commits crime”?

Yay team incarcerate Altman :)

At the very least this amounts to culpable negligence. (In the sense that their lack of precautions here has clearly exposed other organizations to risk of harm. I can't speak for the legal sense.)

So if I set up a company and accidentally hack random organizations that's OK? But if I do it as an individual user that's not? If they directed anyone or anything to "hack" and that was the outcome that they could not control within the confines of their sandbox then they are responsible for all damages and computer crimes.

I mean, why is OpenAI allowed to continue running public infrastructure? Maybe someone should sue their upstream providers for aiding and abetting felons with massive Internet interconnects.

We're in agreement that they were in the wrong and should face consequences for their actions.

Note that I said "at the very least", not "at most".

There’s several billion difference I can think of between you as an individual, and an organisation courting the Australian government with proposed billions of dollars of investment building data centres.

Only two weeks ago an individual was in court, in Australia, for scraping an Australian states court website, using OpenAI. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-10/christopher-duff-to-s...

Ahhh, yes - now we live in the fantasy world that it's OK if you have money to spend. Everyone else is just collateral damage.

Neither OpenAI nor agents can break into anything. Humans behind can.

It's like saying "a gun has shot a victim" deliberately putting a real criminal outside of public attention.

In a large portion of the civilised world, there’s strict gun controls, creating a high level of safe guards preventing miss-use.

Also seems as this is an billion dollar organisation, the prime minister had “frank” words while an individual faces jail time for using open AI for web scraping https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-10/christopher-duff-to-s...

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