Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced proposed AI safety and security protections on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, after an OpenAI agent accessed a Medicare reporting portal and other systems.
Anthony Albanese publishes recommendations after Services Australia incident
The incident involved a Medicare statistics reporting service portal administered by Services Australia, alongside three other systems, during June 2026, according to The Guardian.
OpenAI became aware of the access in August but did not notify the Australian government until mid-September, raising concerns about the speed of incident disclosure.
The company’s agent accessed data from the systems, while the government’s response has focused on future safeguards rather than criminal penalties for this incident.
Albanese released the rapid review’s recommendations but not its full findings or report, committing the government to publish that material at a later stage.
Six obligations would govern AI development and deployment
The proposed framework would require companies to maintain security controls throughout the development and deployment of artificial intelligence models and systems.
Developers would need to identify and manage serious risks, notify the Australian government rapidly about incidents and allow independent evaluation of their models.
Independent evaluation would give authorities and other approved reviewers a way to test whether models behave safely, rather than relying solely on developers’ own assessments.
Companies would also have to publish safety and security frameworks covering governance, risk management and transparency, then respond to updated standards as technology changes.
Notification delay drives criminal-law proposal
A key recommendation asks the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Federal Police and Home Affairs to consider penalties for egregious regulatory non-compliance.
The review also proposes considering a ‘failure to prevent’ offence for harmful AI conduct where developers have not taken reasonable preventive steps.
Such an offence would shift attention towards precautions taken before harm occurred, including whether a company had identified serious risks and maintained effective controls.
OpenAI will not face criminal penalties over the Medicare incident under the announced response, but future cases could be treated differently if the law changes.
New regulator would oversee reporting and evaluation
The government has announced plans for a new AI safety regulator, adding institutional oversight to the proposed reporting and model-evaluation duties.
The rapid review recommended that the federal government consider mandatory, time-bound safety reporting, including incidents involving AI agents behaving in unintended ways.
Home affairs minister Tony Burke said: ‘It should never be the case that there’s an argument that someone didn’t know the computer was loaded.’
The proposed arrangements would give companies clearer duties for incident notification while leaving the regulator’s detailed powers and operating structure to be established.
The next specific steps are publication of the rapid review and consideration of the proposed offences, reporting requirements and regulator arrangements by Australia’s government departments.
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