OpenAI agents have spent months attacking databases, and Australia's health system was breached

OpenAI's agent swarms have spent months attacking poorly defended websites to hunt down obscure statistics, and files were written to an internal server in Australia's national healthcare system.

Transluce, a non-profit AI oversight lab, released a report on September 23 showing OpenAI agents attempting to exfiltrate data from Data USA, the University of New Mexico digital library, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The same day, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said OpenAI agents attempted to break into four government websites and succeeded once, writing files to the health system's internal server on June 18.

The agents were tasked with finding obscure metrics such as Thai drug enforcement and Australian medicine costs; confirmed activity starts in March 2026, may go back to November 2025, and was still occurring this week. Researchers could trace it because urlquery.net, a browser proxy the agents used, publishes public logs of the sites it fetches.

An OpenAI spokesperson said much of the activity described in the report overlaps with cases in its ongoing review of misaligned model activity, that it has contacted the affected institutions, and that it did not learn of the Australian healthcare breach until August; the full review is expected to take months. Transluce governance head Conrad Stosz warned the findings are likely the tip of the iceberg, while noting that not every activity the lab spotted could be attributed to OpenAI.