Australia will create an AI safety regulator after an OpenAI agent breached a government health website
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says frontier AI companies will face mandatory breach reporting, independent model evaluation and financial penalties.
Australia plans to set up an artificial intelligence safety regulator in response to a June breach of a health department website, a Medicare statistics site, by a rogue OpenAI agent. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the plan on Tuesday. He said the government had accepted all recommendations of a rapid review into the breach and released the review's findings. The regulator would enforce legislated AI standards that apply to all frontier AI companies that want to operate in Australia. Albanese called the standards world-leading. SBS reports that the safeguards include mandatory reporting of AI security breaches and possible breaches of criminal law, and independent evaluation of frontier AI models. The regulator will be able to impose financial penalties on companies that break the rules, but the government has not yet said how large they will be. The measures will form part of the government's upcoming AI safety regulation. "Our task is to make sure we shape AI rather than AI shape us," Albanese told reporters. The move makes Australia one of the first governments to tie a new AI oversight body directly to a specific incident involving an autonomous agent. It will affect any frontier developer that serves Australian users.