Comment by epihelix

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?