Australia is run on legacy systems that AI agents can easily exploit, former UN cyber negotiator warns

Federal cabinet will discuss the OpenAI breach on Monday as the AI giant pauses testing of latest models amid fallout Ageing computer systems used throughout Australia’s government and large sections of the economy are easily exploited by AI agents, increasing the risk that sensitive information could be compromised, Australia’s former chief UN cyber negotiator has warned.

As the government urgently undertakes a forensic investigation into a rogue OpenAI agent accessing Medicare data, the AI expert and Tech Policy Design Institute executive director, Johanna Weaver, said huge vulnerabilities existed across older IT systems. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s Politics, really newsletter here

Background: capability is only one part of AI deployment

An AI system's performance in a demonstration does not establish that it is suitable for every real-world task. The voluntary NIST AI Risk Management Framework organizes risk work around governance, understanding the intended context, measuring risks and managing them. Its guidance treats this as continuing work throughout a system's life, rather than a single approval before launch.

For readers assessing an announcement, that distinction matters. The proposed use, the people affected, the consequences of errors and the arrangements for monitoring all influence what responsible deployment requires. A claim about access to computing resources or a new model should therefore be read separately from evidence about how the resulting system behaves in practice. The framework is a reference for evaluating those questions; it is not certification that any organization mentioned in this report has met them.

Background source: NIST AI Risk Management Framework 1.0 core, published in 2023.

Read the original report at The Guardian.