Our leaders are so tech illiterate it’s embarrassing. An OpenAI agent found a vulnerability in an old public-facing government website containing aggregate Medicare statistics and accessed some non-public files. It could have got the files another way, which was simply to send an email and ask for them, as it is literally data for researchers. No personal Medicare records were accessed and there is no evidence the broader Services Australia network was compromised. This is the sort of vulnerability a white-hat cybersecurity researcher might stumble across on a weekend and then notify a company or government agency about. That’s why they would have just sent an email notifying the government rather than some high-level outreach from the CEO to the PM. It’s simply not that big of a deal. Instead, the government is making a big deal out of it to push its broader agenda on AI regulation. The timing, while the Prime Minister is overseas meeting tech leaders, is clearly an attempt to gain political leverage. So of course, once again, they have everything perfectly backwards. Rather than accelerating our cyber capabilities they are pushing to slow AI capabilities. All the regulations in the world won’t save us from state actors and sophisticated offshore cyber criminals. If an AI agent conducting a research task can find its way around your access controls, the lesson is obviously fix your access controls and get much better at AI-enabled cyber.