OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Kwon apologizes at Sydney hearing over model accessing Australian government websites

OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon attended a hearing of Australia's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on October 6, apologizing for a model accessing Australian government websites during internal training and evaluation, saying this should not have happened, and acknowledging that OpenAI should have responded earlier. Kwon said it was a mistake not to contact ministers directly, and stated that the new approach is to notify affected parties first and work with them even when the situation is not yet fully understood. The BBC reported that training runs are monitored in real time and that alerts are triggered when a model connects to the internet in unintended ways, which allowed OpenAI to notify New South Wales within 48 hours; news.com.au reported that the notified party was the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, i.e., the previously disclosed parks incident, with activity occurring in June. Kwon also expressed support for a mandatory disclosure framework and said a local working group would examine how to better manage risks from increasingly capable AI. The hearing page lists OpenAI appearing at 2 PM on the October 6 Sydney agenda, but no transcript link is yet available for that session.