Open AI’s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company’s first in-person mea culpa after it admitted – in an unsigned email, to a public departmental inbox – that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation and grabbed data related to Medicare.
asserted
one → fly → Medicare
Kwon – polite, friendly, even-toned – got through a potentially dicey committee hearing unscathed, promising to do better and pledging assistance to Australia.
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Kwon → get → Australia
No missteps, no viral moments, just delivering his answers helpfully, in a quiet and calm manner, sympathising with the questioner and the point they were making.
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they → deliver → questioner
Even the content of his responses evoked the AI assistant he was there to defend.
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he → evoke → assistant
Asked by Pocock “why did you send an email to an arbitrary department email?” Kwon replied: “In retrospect, we should have done what you’re suggesting”.
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you → ask → what
Asked why Altman wasn’t informed before his meeting with Marles, and why the company didn’t fess up there, Kwon said: “I agree the process by which people became aware of this incident inside our company could have been much better”.
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people → ask → company
One couldn’t help but be reminded of the way the chatbot responds when pulled up on a mistake: “Good catch.
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chatbot → help → mistake
You’re right to push back.
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You → ’re → ?
My bad, that one’s on me.
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one → ’ → me
In Kwon’s parlance, the models – built from the ground up by OpenAI, which reportedly wants to value itself at $1.4tn – “accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.”
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they → build → ways
He tried to explain that the “novelty” of this incident meant the company had “learned our lesson”, which was that it should inform victims of such incidents much earlier, rather than waiting.
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it → try → incidents
Kwon again apologised for the company only sending a casual email to the federal government disclosing that its agent had inappropriately accessed Medicare statistics, but tried to explain to Tuesday’s parliamentary hearing that it was sometimes “difficult” to figure how to make such notifications to a big sprawling public service.
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it → apologise → service
Senator David Pocock helpfully offered: “I assume someone in your government relations team has mobile phone numbers of ministers and various people?”
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someone → offer → ministers
There was a similar air of post-facto contrition as Kwon – OpenAI’s chief strategy officer – could offer few answers about why the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, didn’t inform the Australian deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, about the incident when they met face-to-face in San Francisco on 1 September.
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they → be → September
That was nine days before the company emailed Services Australia, and nearly a whole month after it first learned of the 18 June intrusion.
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it → email → intrusion
Kwon said Altman wasn’t aware of the incident before the Marles meeting.
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Altman → say → meeting
After today’s committee hearing, it’s still unclear why.
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it → ’ → hearing
It’s a big government, and maybe Kwon is right that it’s “difficult” to find the right person to talk to.
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it → ’ → person
But some could also argue that your boss shaking hands with Australia’s deputy prime minister would be something of a useful window.
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boss → argue → window
At least, we learned, he said the company didn’t use AI to write the infamous email.
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company → learn → email
Small blessings that they managed to ask a human to write the email – even if it went to an obscure inbox.
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it → manage → inbox
But with Australia actually striving to become a tech capital for datacentres and AI – as the revolving door of big tech companies told the inquiry, from Anthropic to Microsoft and Google – then setting the basic rules of the road for these firms, about how they must act and respond to this country and its government, is critical.
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they → strive → country
Kwon said OpenAI was committed to providing future notifications “very quickly”, and that there were no further incidents they were aware of.
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they → say → notifications
But he casually dropped in one staggering fact: OpenAI was still trawling through the activity logs for the agents involved in the Services Australia breach, with those logs totalling 50 petabytes of data.
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logs → drop → data
Kwon made the mind-boggling claim that it would take a human 66m years – never sleeping, never resting – to go through that data by hand.
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it → make → hand
The team tasked with checking Services Australia’s email inboxes must be hoping there aren’t any more dramas lurking in there.
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team → task → inboxes
The Aporia
