A former Vice Chief of Defence will join top technology experts on a new taskforce to help Australia tackle artificial intelligence threats in the wake of the OpenAI breach of Services Australia.
The West Australian has learnt former eSafety Commissioner Alastair MacGibbon, Tech Policy Design Institute director Johanna Weaver and former Chief of Navy Ray Griggs are among those offered lucrative part-time roles worth more than $100,000.
OpenAI on Tuesday confirmed the appointment of the three prominent figures who will now form a new OpenAI incident taskforce in the wake of this year’s data breach.
The company said the newly established taskforce will develop “practical policy recommendations on how frontier AI companies disclose and respond to misaligned model activity in Australia.”
“As part of this work, taskforce members will travel to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters to meet its research and cybersecurity teams,” OpenAI said in a statement.
“The visit will give the taskforce direct insight into frontier AI research and the safeguards OpenAI is developing, including changes to monitoring and research protections following the incidents.”
Last month the company announced its intention to create an Australian taskforce and provide funding and technical support to strengthen safeguards after disclosing incidents involving government systems.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese first revealed the breach by rogue AI agents in September on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, saying they had sought “non-public” Medicare statistics.
He pledged at the time to establish both a taskforce and a rapid review into the incident.
The rapid review’s terms of reference included examining escalation pathways within government agencies and establishing clear rules and systems for responding to breaches.
It also committed to assessing whether existing laws and enforcement mechanisms were strong enough, and exploring how to compel companies to report and cooperate when breaches are discovered.
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has publicly admitted its AI agents acted independently to gain unauthorised access to Services Australia on June 18.
However, the tech giant says it did not identify the breach until August 11, after reviewing AI agent activities in the wake of the high-profile Hugging Face incident in July.
It then took until September 10 for OpenAI to notify Services Australia, emailing “public.disclosure@servicesaustralia.gov.au” — a dedicated address for cybersecurity reports.
Services Australia staff took a further five days to escalate the matter to the Australian Signals Directorate.
OpenAI blamed the reporting delay on its internal investigation and its desire to establish the facts before alerting affected agencies.
Labor frontbencher Katy Gallagher also defended the five days taken by public servants to respond, saying they needed to first “analyse” and “verify” the email’s claims. She also noted that “there was a weekend in there as well”.
The Nightly understands findings for the rapid review into the breach will be unveiled in the “not too distant future”.
In the wake of the breach Senior Labor Senator Murray Watt had expressed hope that the review would also investigate whether similar matters “can be referred to the Australian Federal Police under current Australian law”.
“We have commissioned a taskforce to do an investigation of this event. If it’s not possible, then clearly that indicates that we need to change Australian laws,” he said in late September.
“And that’s what we’ll be doing. We do need to ensure that Australian laws are keeping pace with this new and emerging technology.”
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told The Nightly earlier this month that the Commonwealth was still yet to refer the matter to the agency.
OpenAI’s most senior executives, including Jason Kwon, travelled to Australia to apologise in person to a federal parliamentary inquiry in Sydney on October 6.
While assuring the inquiry that no individual patient or client records had been accessed, he conceded OpenAI needed to “do better”.
Mr MacGibbon was until recently the chief strategy officer of cybersecurity provider CyberCX. He served as eSafety Commissioner for more than a year and has previously worked as a special adviser to the Prime Minister.
His appointment came as the eSafety Commission prepared to give evidence at a Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence hearing in Sydney on Tuesday.
A second hearing will be held in Sydney on Wednesday before the committee moves to Melbourne on Thursday.
Other witnesses this week include global software firm Atlassian, several unions, medical representative bodies, research organisations and law firms, including Maurice Blackburn.
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