OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks to the White House to attend a state dinner hosted for China's President Xi Jinping, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: of all the websites in all the countries in all the world, OpenAI's agent walked into ours. It began with something quite mundane: an internal test to find figures on Australia's spending on medicines. In the process, an AI agent broke into a government statistics service and gained high-level access to write files to its server, leaving Australian officials to investigate what happened.The service was part of Medicare, Australia's universal health insurance scheme, so I understand why the story has caused such concern. Australians trust Medicare and rely on it; the thought that their health records might be exposed is unsettling. Mercifully, in this case, the statistics portal was an unrelated system, and the government has found no evidence that patient records were accessed. But it still leaves us with plenty of questions about what actually happened, and a warning about less benign intrusions to come.When I first started speaking with people inside government about the incident, I was trying to get the facts about how a company lost control of its own software. How far had it gotten, and more importantly, how had a request for spending figures led to unauthorized access? But the more I learnt about the response, the more I wondered what the company…

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