In the wake of yesterday’s news that an OpenAI agent hacked Australia’s Medicare system earlier this year, some people have pointed to the incident as evidence that Australia needs to develop its own artificial intelligence models.

For example, Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said the breach:

provides the justification … for our determination to make sure that we have Australian AI, that we shape technology, we have sovereign capability in Australia, and we aren’t entirely at the mercy of foreign AI companies".

provides the justification … for our determination to make sure that we have Australian AI, that we shape technology, we have sovereign capability in Australia, and we aren’t entirely at the mercy of foreign AI companies".

Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume echoed this. Speaking on Sunrise this morning, she said the hack shows why Australia needs to embrace major AI companies “so that we can have frontier models providing sovereign capability to Australia”.

But would having an Australian AI actually help protect us from an AI agent-led hack? And if so, how?

The first known hack of a government system

As part of a training exercise in June, OpenAI tasked an agent with researching public medical data. In pursuit of this goal, the agent breached a firewall........

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