2026-10-06
Following reports of another hack of a NSW Government website by an OpenAI agent, the Greens NSW are repeating their demand of the NSW Government to immediately conduct an audit of all government systems and databases to check for data breaches or interference. This follows confirmation that another OpenAI agent accessed a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application in June, with authorities only informed of the "misalignment" this week.
Quotes attributable to Abigail Boyd, Greens NSW Spokesperson for Industry:
“We simply cannot trust these companies. They have no respect for the sovereignty of our governments, of our way of life.
“The fact this occurred in June and we were not notified until October is damning. They are either woefully incompetent and haven't got a clue what they are doing, or they are run by arrogant little tinpot tyrants with no respect for our sovereignty. I honestly don’t know which is cause for greater concern.
“We need an urgent, forensic, and wide-ranging digital audit of all NSW Government systems to make sure similar breaches have not occurred. We clearly cannot rely on these multinational big tech companies to comply with even the most minimal of social obligations such as notifying when, or even taking enough care to notice if, their products are hacking government systems.
“The NSW Government must not rely on the non-existent benevolence of these antisocial tech companies. We must assert our own sovereignty and ensure more of our data and government information has not been breached.
“Breaches like this one rightly undermine public confidence in these big AI tech companies. Firstly, of course it’s hugely concerning that they are training models that will so readily hack into government servers and databases, that danger alone should cause us to pause and say you know what, maybe we shouldn’t be seeking to accelerate the development of this technology with huge data centres here in Australia and around the world.
“Secondly, this example puts the lie to the argument that we need to have data centres here in Australia to create AI models that respect Australian laws and culture. Hacking government servers is illegal in the USA where this agent was deployed from, yet it did it anyway. The idea that, because an AI may have had its training runs or inference conducted in a data centre located in Australia, that would have any bearing on its conduct and behaviour is demonstrably false.”