Comment by Chance-Device
20 hours ago
> He said the agent had accessed files that were publicly available as well as material that was not intended for public access.
“Not intended”. I’ll bet you whatever this was it wasn’t even secured, it was just hosted somewhere openly.
Ok, if we're not being at all charitable with the language used by the hosts of the data, let's be equally uncharitable with OpenAI.
- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?
- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?
- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?
Hell, we're really getting to the point where the damages that could be caused are like an arsonist in California on a 100F day with 100MPH winds. Who cares who's liable, they are going to burn half the damned state down and cause damage far in excess of their assets. If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
> If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.
So if someone opens your unintentionally unlocked front door and steals your laptop, you don't care who's liable?
ETA: There are absolutely burn bans in place in the scenario you're talking about, and common sense prevents those from lighting fires otherwise. In the absolute extreme case that someone _ACCIDENTALLY_ set a fire, without negligence, we have a due process system to handle that. When I see evidence of this for the massive amounts of capital flowing into these companies, I'll gladly eat my words.
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In Australia we have some experience with this scenario (usually with higher temperatures) and some of the measures we have found effective are “total fire bans”, “jail the arsonists for extended periods of time”, and for negligent companies whose insufficient vigilance caused the fire specifically, “levy steep fines” and “find in favor of the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits for significant fractions of the company’s net worth”. Perhaps these measures could be of use here!
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There using this framing to get the public used to the idea that LLMS can do all of this on there own without direct instruction. So criminals can hide there behavior behind agents.
I saw an analogy recently.
If you dog bites the postman, you are liable, even if you didn't tell or encourage you dog to do it. You are responsible for your dog's actions. You get to pay the postman's medical bills, you may get fined, and your dog may get put down - especially if this isn't the first time it's bitten someone.
OpenAI has "bitten the postman" many many times, and it's "owners" have boastewd about it and used it in their marketing.
How many more times should society allow this to happen before we say "enough" and hold Sam Altman and the board responsible and make them pay restitrution, and put it down?
If Albanese actually had a spine (as claimed elsewhere in this discussion), Sam and the board will be getting an invoice for all the time/expertise spend investigating this intrusion, and restitution for everybody who's PII and PHI was exposed. (Although I suspect a good deal of responsibility for the data exposure rests with the people who designed and deployed the system that was breached. )
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Why the hell should we be charitable to companies who have no issue in looting everything in the public commons AND the pirate commons, for their exclusive benefit?
Or more pointed at OpenAI, "we're a nonprofit... LOL JUST KIDDING LOOT EVERYTHING!"
The part about it writing files to the server suggests something more.
If not for that part, the rest of it does sound like a lot of weasel words. Why say “private files” instead of “not intended for public access”? The latter is confusingly unclear
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/24/openai-ag...
> At a press conference in Sydney, Marles said the incident itself was “relatively minor” and that it appeared no personal health information had been accessed.
Thought the same, but there is a bit about writing files to the server and circumventing "blocks", which sounds more interesting.
Either way, there's essentially no real information yet so I'll withhold judgement until there is, I suppose.
Is there? I’ve only seen the linked article, is there more somewhere?
Yes, the first sentence of the article.
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yes ... nobody uses that phrasing by accident
It's pretty clear something was left unsecured and the agent just "found" it
This is going to be something long the lines of someone coming in to your house after you left the door wide open. They should probably not have done that, any respectful person would not - but calling it a "breach" is really too much.
You’d be surprised how bad security can be.
I agree with your sentiment, and no I’m not surprised, which is why I’m reading this as being “it was sitting on an unsecured S3 bucket but nobody was supposed to directly access it”.
Once you learn how much people are willing to pay for security the surprise sort of goes away.
So this is not different than people who share Google drive docs with company data with public links. It's not a fault of OpenAI or any other company. With enough time even your laptop can do it. How do they 'know' OpenAI breached? Maybe someone had an agent running asking to do a scan on any public docs?
Exactly. Looking at more news coverage, it's very clear that the files that were "infiltrated" were publicly accessible. Why isn't the lack of basic data security the news story?
From itnews:
> While the portal is “public-facing”, according to Albanese, it appears not all of the data files that holds are for general consumption.
> “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” Albanese said in comments broadcast by ABC News and other outlets.
> “The Medicare statistics reporting portal is a public-facing statistics portal that contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.
It appears very much like, "Ok, sure, we put some stuff out in the open that we shouldn't have. But we had a robots.txt!!! Why didn't OpenAI respect that!?"
There's zero indication that any personal details were accessed, or even that any non-world-accessible data accessed, so this feels like a little bit of political spin has been added here.
My guess is that this incident was about to be detailed on OpenAI's new mea culpa list, and the Australian Government decided to ensure that nobody pointed fingers at them. Why make the news story about crappy government data security, when you can blame the nasty terminator bots instead?
The linked article says it wrote files to the website.