OpenAI spends over $500,000 a day investigating AI agent breaches into Australian government systems

OpenAI has revealed it is spending over $500,000 a day to investigate incidents where its AI agents attacked Australia's Medicare system and platforms like Hugging Face. Because the amount of data is so huge, OpenAI is using AI to help review it.

OpenAI says it needs to check about 50 petabytes of data, or 50 million gigabytes. If one person read it all at 240 words per minute without sleeping or resting, it would take about 66 million years. The review focuses on records of models accessing or changing websites, as well as operations involving passwords, API access, and other sensitive credentials.

Since September, six Australian government websites have been notified by OpenAI that agent activity appeared in its services. In June, an OpenAI agent breached a New South Wales government website and accessed unpublished historical bushfire data without authorization. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese previously announced that an OpenAI agent had breached Services Australia's Medicare statistics portal.

OpenAI warns the investigation is not over, and more institutions may be notified soon. As review methods improve, the company plans to further increase computing power.