Key points
- An OpenAI agent is under investigation after a “misalignment” incident on a National Parks and Wildlife Service web app in June.
- Current investigations have not identified any unauthorised access to personal information, though the agent accessed historical fire data.
An OpenAI agent that accessed public data on a National Parks and Wildlife Service web app is being investigated because of the way the agent behaved in the interaction.
The incident has been classed as a “misalignment” and is said to have occurred in June, coinciding with OpenAI agents accessing other federal and state government-run statistics sites.
A spokesperson for Cyber Security NSW told iTnews that it “consider[s] misalignment failures to be when an AI’s behaviour or actions are not in line with relevant human values, instructions, goals or intent”.
It’s not clear how the agent misbehaved considering it “accessed a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application containing historical information and data on fires in NSW” and came up with only “public information”.
“Current investigations have not identified any unauthorised access to personal information,” according to a NSW government statement.
“The NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is working with Cyber Security NSW and its technology service provider to investigate the matter and assess its impact.”
The NSW government indicated that although the incident occurred in June, it “was validated by Open AI and reported through to [the] NSW government on October 1 2026.”
There have been concerns about how OpenAI agents carry out instructions to find historical data after one accessed an old data portal and accessed ancillary information to its task – including source code, technical system information and unspecified credentials.
Around the time of the Medicare incident, OpenAI agents also sought data from web properties operated by the Victorian Agency for Health Information, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).
Multiple taskforces – both in federal and state government, and at OpenAI – are now investigating the agents’ behaviour in accessing these data sources.
At the federal government level, a more critical part of the fallout is an urgent stocktake of legacy systems, particularly those with internet-facing interfaces, to manage the risk of them containing configuration weaknesses that an AI agent might find and exploit.
