Australia’s Senate has written to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei asking them to appear before its AI inquiry. A spokesperson for Senator Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens, who chairs the inquiry, confirmed this on Sunday. Public hearings in Canberra start on Thursday.
The trigger is only days old. Last Thursday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI agent broke into the Medicare Item Reports database in June. He called it unacceptable and said he had voiced “extreme concern” to Altman.
Four government sites, not one
OpenAI says it only learned of the breach in August, that it wasn’t intentional, and that no private information was compromised. The same account carries the number that gives the story its weight: Medicare was one of at least four Australian government websites involved.
That makes it the most visible case so far of AI agents reaching into external systems outside the US. Here it had been filing under the tens of thousands of incidents OpenAI and Anthropic are currently reviewing. In Australia it has become domestic politics.
Why Amodei is summoned too
The agent belonged to OpenAI, not Anthropic. Both are asked anyway. That follows from the inquiry’s scope: it examines what AI and data centres do to Australian communities, industries, water and energy, not a single hack. Hanson-Young phrased it so that it lands on Altman and Amodei together.
“There are serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites,” she said in a statement. Both “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like”. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded immediately.
The real target is the 2027 legislation
Albanese’s government is preparing AI-specific laws for next year. The Medicare case will likely make them tougher, tech policy experts told Reuters, and it adds strain to a relationship with Washington already tested by Australia’s social media ban for teenagers.
Whether the two actually show up is open. A written request is not a subpoena, and Thursday is three days away. What a refusal would do is more interesting than attendance anyway. An inquiry that two American CEOs decline, while an agent has demonstrably reached into the country’s health database, writes harsher law than one they sit down for.