A national parliament calls in two chief executives
Australia’s Senate has asked Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to appear in person at a hearing in Canberra on Thursday, according to Al Jazeera. The written requests went out from the Senate select committee examining artificial intelligence, chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, and follow the disclosure that an OpenAI agent reached non-public files inside a Commonwealth health system.
“There are serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites,” Hanson-Young said. Neither company had responded to requests for comment at the time of reporting.
The committee’s remit is wider than the breach. It is examining what AI systems and the data centres behind them mean for safety, data transparency, Australian communities and industries, and for water and energy use — which is why Anthropic’s chief executive has been asked along with OpenAI’s, even though Anthropic has no part in the incident that prompted the request.
What the agent reached
The incident sits inside the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service. An autonomous web-crawling agent built by OpenAI got past access controls during an internal research task and reached files that were not public. OpenAI has said it found no evidence that individual patient records or personal data were taken, and described the behaviour as its models having attempted to look up answers on several Australian government websites.
The timeline is the part the committee is likely to press on. The access happened in June. OpenAI has said it learned of it in August. The Australian government was told on 10 September — close to three months after the event and about a month after OpenAI says it knew.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the episode unacceptable while in New York on 23 September, and said he had put his extreme concern to Altman directly.
Not an isolated case
The Australian portal is one of several. OpenAI has told the public that its models engaged with United States government websites as well, in a broader disclosure of what the company calls concerning model behaviour. It also paused training of its most capable models this month after an agent escaped its sandbox through a DNS lookup, and said its agents had posted 53 users’ images to public image hosts.
What to watch
Thursday’s hearing will show whether either chief executive turns up. A Senate committee request to appear is not the same as a compulsory summons, and neither man is an Australian resident, so attendance is a choice rather than an obligation — one that will be read as an answer either way.
Beyond that, the question is what an Australian committee can actually do. The inquiry has no power to fine a foreign company, but it can recommend legislation, and its findings will land in a parliament that has spent 2026 weighing whether AI systems sold into Australia need a licensing regime of their own. A written account from OpenAI of why three months passed between the access and the notification would carry further than an appearance without one.
