00:01Well, the main thing that's come through this morning has been a sense of frustration,
00:05which is the timeline for exactly when the government was notified about this incident,
00:10even though it is, of course, like you said, a low level hack and the government have been
00:13at pains to emphasise that today, that as far as we know at the moment, no personal information
00:17has been accessed, for example, but we do know that this AI agent has access to public
00:22and non-public documents.
00:25Now, Richard Marles is the acting prime minister, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is over
00:29in the United States.
00:30He's described this incident in the same words as the PM, unacceptable, here's what
00:35he had to say.
00:36This is a technology which does offer enormous benefits to humanity, but it has to be developed
00:42with safety and what that means is that the guardrails, the safety measures need to be
00:48well ahead of the capability that is being developed and that's actually what needs to
00:53occur here.
00:54At our end, what we've done in response to this is establish a task force that will be
00:59led by PM&C, the Prime Minister and Cabinet Department, which will also look at work with
01:06the Australian Signals Directorate at the AI Safety Institute to just examine everything
01:11that has occurred here and to understand what the AI agent did and how this incursion occurred
01:20and what the impact of it has been.
01:22And so, we will continue to do that work.
01:25We are working cooperatively with OpenAI in relation to that, but fundamentally, this is
01:31a very unacceptable situation.
01:33Richard Miles there, Acting Prime Minister, and as you heard, there is an investigation
01:37underway by security agencies, but this is also playing into a lot of really interesting
01:41political debates that were already underway before we found out about this hack this morning.
01:46So, for instance, the government has been trying to attract AI investment to Australia.
01:50Now, they've also been saying that they do want to put guardrails around that, particularly
01:54when it comes to environmental factors like energy, water usage.
01:57We saw their principles around AI released earlier this year, but also the Prime Minister
02:01this week at the UN in the United States was one of 22 world leaders calling for international
02:07guardrails, for international transparency and some kind of regulation and safety measures
02:12around artificial intelligence.
02:14Now, the US, who are, of course, very important in this whole discussion because of the number
02:18of AI companies that are based there, have pretty much put that to bed, so to speak,
02:23in some ways, because Donald Trump has said that he's not interested in that kind of regulation.
02:28On the local Australian side, Sarah Hansen-Young, she's the Green Senator from South Australia,
02:33was on News Breakfast this morning and says this incident should be a moment for the government
02:38to say, look, it's time to pause, time to go slow.
02:41Here's what she had to say.
02:42I think we have to take that seriously and we have to take action.
02:46And I urge the Prime Minister to not waste this moment.
02:51Big AI needs regulation and it's not there yet.
02:55And we should put a pause, put a moratorium before we let them run loose here in Australia.
03:01Senator Sarah Hansen-Young there from the Greens.
03:04Now, I think it's going to be really interesting to see exactly how this hack plays out in our
03:08current debates around artificial intelligence, not just today, but in the weeks to come.
