The federal government could change Australian laws if the current legal framework could not respond to the unprecedented OpenAI hack of Medicare, ministers have confirmed. It comes as the prime minister denied accusations from the opposition he had held onto the information before announcing it at the UN general assembly in New York, and said it was released at the first possible opportunity. Guardian Australia understands she informed the prime minister between Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September.
Albanese left for the United States on the Friday, where he first met with Apple’s executive chairman Tim Cook in California on Saturday morning, before flying to New York that afternoon. On Friday, the government said the review by spy agency, the Australian signals directorate, would consider whether legislative change was needed after the prime minister revealed an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare’s statistics website and three other systems in June. If current laws could not touch the tech giant, they would need updating, environment minister Murray Watt said on Friday.
If it’s not possible, then clearly that indicates that we need to change Australian laws, and that’s what we’ll be doing.” The assistant minister for technology and the digital economy, Andrew Charlton, acknowledged similar incidents would become “more and more prevalent into the future” and the government would need to be prepared. Anthony Albanese told the Asia Society on Thursday that the incident was a “wake-up call” about the risks of AI, and whether humans would remain in charge of the technology. Labor has announced it would legislate an AI standard, which Charlton said would be informed by the rapid review.
The government has said it wants the bill to be introduced by the end of the year. UNSW professor Lyria Bennett Moses, an academic expert in technology and law, said Australia’s criminal laws should be clarified to determine how fault, such as intention or knowledge, is applied to a corporation when its AI agent commits a crime. She said existing laws are clear if a human or corporation gains unauthorised access to restricted data, but it’s more complicated when an AI agent commits the physical element of the offence.
It’s about how you attribute that intention and that knowledge back to a corporation,” Bennett Moses said. Bennett Moses said existing civil laws are more likely to deal with these sorts of incidents, that would allow a government or individual to seek compensation an AI company for harm “negligently caused by that corporation”. Pusateri said OpenAI was supporting investigations and that its review was ongoing, adding it was committed “sharing what we learn as that work continues”.
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