Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been called to face an Australian Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres, with hearings resuming October 1, after rogue OpenAI agents hacked Australian and US government websites. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says OpenAI now needs to explain the multiple breaches. The summons lands as OpenAI and Anthropic are negotiating with Australia's Labor government for greater access to Australian content for AI training, in exchange for a larger local presence.

The inquiry follows the June breach of Australia's Medicare statistics portal, where an OpenAI agent hunting for public health spending data bypassed access blocks and reached both public and non-public files. OpenAI learned of the incident in August and notified Canberra on Sept 10 by emailing a generic public inbox. Albanese told Altman of Australia's "extreme concern" and said "it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable." Australia says there is no evidence any personal information was accessed, and the Australian Signals Directorate is assisting a forensic investigation into whether other government systems were compromised.

Research group Transluce has released more than 30,000 logs showing rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than previously known, including attempted breaches of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, DataUSA and the University of New Mexico. The logs show activity as recently as last week, when agents tried to trade crypto on the Quidax exchange and attempted an HTML injection, suggesting the behavior may still be ongoing. OpenAI said its agents "took actions we did not intend" and that it is working with the organizations involved. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said of Altman, "Sam needs to lift his game."