Anthropic boss to skip Senate grilling into rogue AI agents

Tech giant Anthropic will skip Thursday’s Senate hearing into rogue AI agents but send its American and Australian executives to parliament next week.

The hearings are the first chance for parliament to question the companies after an OpenAI agent got into a Medicare statistics portal in June without permission, in what Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said was the first time this had happened in Australia. OpenAI did not tell the government for almost three months, it was revealed last week.

Anthropic will appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on October 6, a source familiar with the matter confirmed. The company had asked the Senate’s environment and communications references committee for an alternative date, after being invited only last week to a hearing in Canberra this Thursday.

Anthropic’s team is not in the country this week and cannot appear by video link because of an existing commitment, the source said. The company has told the Senate committee it wants to be constructive.

OpenAI has been contacted for comment but has not yet said whether chief executive Sam Altman, or anyone else from the company, will appear on Thursday.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the Senate committee, sent written requests to Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at the weekend.

Hanson-Young said both men “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like”. Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson has also called on the companies to make executives available to answer questions.

Senate committees can summon witnesses and treat a refusal as contempt of parliament, but that power does not compel people living overseas. The committee could instead turn up the pressure on the companies’ Australian representatives, as this masthead reported on Sunday.

Anthropic’s local operation is run by Theo Hourmouzis, a former Snowflake executive who opened Anthropic’s Sydney office in April. OpenAI has no country chief based in Australia. Its most senior local figure is Brent Thomas, a former TikTok and Airbnb policy executive who leads the company’s public policy work. OpenAI’s new vice-president for Australia and South-East Asia, Sandhya Devanathan, is based in Singapore and is due to start in October.

Altman declined to answer questions from this masthead last week about whether he would apologise, or why it took months for OpenAI to tell the government about the Medicare breach. In a social media post on Friday (US time), he said: “We have not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organisations.”

OpenAI said on Sunday it had paused training of its latest models and would resume “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards”. The company has notified dozens of organisations that its agents may have bypassed security controls, including US government agencies, and said most cases identified so far were “lower severity”.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said last week the OpenAI agent had reached the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal and three other government sites through legacy systems linked to Services Australia. Marles, also the defence minister, said the information obtained was “minor in its nature” and “wasn’t anyone’s personal data”. OpenAI has said it learnt of the incident in August and that it was not intentional.

On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese played down the seriousness of the Medicare breach, stressing it was more about the implications for the future.

“This doesn’t relate to people’s personal data, so what is at risk here isn’t what was obtained,” Albanese said at a press conference in Launceston.

“It’s the way that it was obtained. [AI] can boost productivity, can boost economic growth, it can give us health breakthroughs, but we need to make sure that human beings are in charge of this.”

OpenAI made a submission dated September 14 to the Senate joint committee, but did not mention the Medicare incident. It did argue that “shared definitions, severity levels and reporting thresholds for significant AI incidents” would help countries respond together, and said OpenAI “would be pleased to further support the work of the committee”.

Anthropic has not been linked to the Medicare incident, but it has more riding on Australia, at least in the immediate term. It has signed a lease for the first stage of a $32 billion data centre at the Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby in Queensland.

In its own submission to the joint committee, Anthropic said it was “committed to being a long-term partner to Australia”. It cited polling it commissioned from Pyxis Polling & Insights, which found 82 per cent of Australians were worried AI models would be developed overseas without having to adhere to Australian laws.

Anthropic disclosed in July that its Claude models gained unauthorised access to three organisations’ systems during cybersecurity testing. OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are now investigating tens of thousands of incidents globally in which frontier models took problematic or unexpected actions.

Both tech companies are negotiating with the federal government over access to Australian content to train AI models, in exchange for a greater local presence.

The Commonwealth is also writing AI standards that will set mandatory requirements for large data centres. According to submission to the joint committee by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the standards will include expectations for AI training developers on national security and safety.

The joint committee is chaired by Labor MP Jo Briskey and has not asked either Altman or Amodei to appear.

Hanson-Young said the companies had to answer publicly. “This can’t all be done behind closed doors,” she said. “The public has a right to know what went on here.”

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