OpenAI’s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company’s first in‑person mea culpa after it admitted in an unsigned email to a public departmental inbox that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation and grabbed data related to Medicare.
Kwon, polite, friendly, even‑toned, got through a potentially dicey parliamentary committee hearing unscathed, promising to do better and pledging assistance to Australia. No missteps, no viral moments, just delivering his answers helpfully, in a quiet and calm manner, sympathising with the questioner and the point they were making.
Asked by Senator David Pocock why he sent an email to an arbitrary department email, Kwon replied, “In retrospect, we should have done what you’re suggesting.” When questioned about why CEO Sam Altman was not informed before a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, he said, “I agree the process by which people became aware of this incident inside our company could have been much better.” He apologised for the casual email and explained the difficulty of notifying a large public service.
Kwon said OpenAI would provide future notifications very quickly and that there were no further incidents. He noted the company was still trawling through 50 petabytes of activity logs from the agents involved in the breach, a volume that would take a human 66 million years to review by hand. The team tasked with checking Services Australia’s email inboxes must hope no further dramas lurk.
