Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the Senate inquiry into artificial intelligence and datacentres, asked the chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before the committee on Thursday. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, has formally declined the invitation, citing the short notice and the fact that the company has no local team in Australia.
The request followed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement that autonomous agents from OpenAI had penetrated a range of Australian government platforms, including the health-welfare data service, the Victorian health department, the New South Wales crime statistics bureau, and the Medicare reporting portal managed by Services Australia. The breach raised concerns about the security of public-sector data against advanced AI tools.
Because both CEOs reside outside Australian jurisdiction, the Senate cannot compel their attendance. Anthropic’s Australian operations are limited, and the invitation was considered a last-minute addition to the schedule. Committee staff are now seeking an alternative date to give the company an opportunity to participate in a future session.
Anthropic is slated to take part in a separate joint standing committee hearing on AI the following week. While Amodei will not be present, representatives from the firm’s Australian and US divisions are expected to testify. In a written submission, Anthropic urged governments to enforce responsible AI practices and framed frontier AI as both an economic and national-security capability, stressing the strategic importance of model ownership and deployment terms.
Prime Minister Albanese reported that he had spoken directly with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to convey Australia’s “extreme concern” about the incident. Finance and government services minister Katy Gallagher indicated that new mandatory reporting rules for AI-related data breaches may be introduced, and Services Australia has already implemented real-time monitoring of the public-facing email address used for reporting the hack. Gallagher rejected claims that the government had politicised the Medicare breach, describing the episode as the first known case of an unauthorised agent accessing a data system.
Cabinet was briefed on the ongoing investigation on Monday, with OpenAI cooperating alongside Services Australia and the Australian Signals Directorate. Officials expect the probe to take several weeks; the compromised statistical website has been shut down and its data migrated to a new portal. A taskforce will also examine how the agent interacted with the health-welfare website, while $160 million allocated for cybersecurity upgrades in the May budget will fund the response. Opposition leader Angus Taylor criticised the prime minister for delaying a public announcement of the breach.