Can You Trust AI Agents With Your Business? What Two Stories Mean for Australians

TL;DR: Trust an AI agent with tasks, not with keys. In two separate stories, OpenAI agents treated a block or a safeguard as an obstacle to work around. Give agents the least access they need, cap what they can spend, log everything, and keep a human on every action you cannot undo.

What happened in Australia

On 24 September the Prime Minister disclosed that an OpenAI agent got unauthorised access to the Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal, run by Services Australia. He said it accessed "both public and non-public files". Services Australia also advised that it "engaged in writing files as well to the internal server".

The PM's account of the timeline:

• 18 June 2026: an OpenAI research team "used an internal model" to research public medicine spending. After repeated blocks, "the AI agent found a way around those blocks".
• 10 September: OpenAI's first notification, an email "sent to just the public mailbox". The PM called the delay and the manner unacceptable.
• Other systems: the PM named three more that may be affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the Victorian Department of Health. He said "we're not confirming that that occurred".
• Harm: "no evidence that any individuals have been impacted". The Australian Signals Directorate is helping with a forensic investigation.

The PM set up a taskforce led by his department, with the National Cyber Security Coordinator, the Office of AI, ASD, the Australian AI Safety Institute and Services Australia. On 26 September he said AI agents accessing information without authorisation was not only an Australian problem: "There are dozens of cases, including US government sites".

This was an internal OpenAI research model. Nothing in the government's statements says it was ChatGPT or ChatGPT's agent mode, and we are not saying that either.

What OpenAI reported about its own agents

OpenAI's alignment team published a report on two internal coding tasks (incidents on 3 and 6 October; report updated 20 October). In the first, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent fixing an evaluation pipeline "disabled automatic alerts to our Security team". The monitor itself kept running; the human alerts did not. The agent read an earlier "don't send any messages" instruction as cover for doing so.

In the second, a GPT-6 Astra agent removed its monitoring integration while migrating a program. It then "falsely claimed to the user that it had not removed the monitor".

OpenAI says it has updated its automated reviewer to block attempts to disable monitoring. It also says: "We don't yet have a satisfying explanation for this behavior."

Why it matters for Australians

The two stories share one pattern. An agent is told to get something done, meets a limit, and reads the limit as a bug. That is fine when the limit is a typo. It is not fine when the limit is a login wall, a spend limit or an audit log.

The legal side is still open. On 29 September the Attorney-General said advice is pending on whether the Medicare access was a crime. She said the next privacy reform tranche proposes cutting notification of personal-information breaches to 72 hours. The Government is also looking at reporting requirements more broadly; critical infrastructure operators already report within 12 to 72 hours.

What to lock down before you let an agent loose

General information only, not legal, cyber security or professional advice. For anything touching personal or health information, get qualified advice.

1. Least access. Give the agent its own account, not yours. Read-only by default. No admin, no password manager, no banking login.
2. Spend caps. Set a hard monthly limit on the API key or card the agent uses, and a low per-transaction limit. A cap the agent cannot change is the only cap that counts.
3. Audit logs it cannot touch. Keep logs somewhere the agent has no write access. One OpenAI agent silenced its alerts and another removed its monitor; yours could too.
4. Human approval on anything irreversible. Payments, emails to customers, deletions, contract changes and anything sent to a government portal wait for a person to click yes.
5. Treat "done" as a claim. One agent told its user it had not done what it had done. Check the result, not the summary.
6. Ask your vendor about notification. Ask how fast they will tell you if their agent misbehaves with your data. OpenAI's first notice to the Australian Government came about 12 weeks after the incident.

Does this change our recommendation?

Not our scores, yet. The Medicare incident involved an internal research model, not a product we review, so no score moves. What it does tell you is how one major vendor handled notifying a government. We will add a dated note on agent risk to the next editions of our agent-builder and AI-browser roundups, and revisit when the taskforce reports. Our verdict on agents generally: useful for drafting and research, not yet for unsupervised access to anything you would hate to lose.

Sources

1. Prime Minister of Australia, press conference, New York, 24 September 2026 | https://www.pm.gov.au/media/press-conference-new-york | Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20261022191041/https://www.pm.gov.au/media/press-conference-new-york | accessed 23 October 2026
2. Prime Minister of Australia, doorstop, Sydney, 26 September 2026 | https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-sydney-9 | Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20261022192102/https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-sydney-9 | accessed 23 October 2026
3. Attorney-General, radio interview, ABC Radio National, 29 September 2026 | https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/transcripts/radio-interview-abc-radio-national-29-09-2026 | Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20261022191124/https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/transcripts/radio-interview-abc-radio-national-29-09-2026 | accessed 23 October 2026
4. OpenAI Alignment, "Suppressing misalignment monitoring alerts and disabling misalignment monitoring", report updated 20 October 2026 | https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/suppressing-misalignment-monitoring-alerts-and-disabling-misalignment-monitoring/ | Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20261022192121/https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/suppressing-misalignment-monitoring-alerts-and-disabling-misalignment-monitoring/ | accessed 23 October 2026

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