LATIKA M BOURKE: Anthony Albanese’s selfie diplomacy with Donald Trump matters little in AI ‘alarmist’ world

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says OpenAI agents hacked into a Medicare statistics website researching data on drug prices but refused to say if he raised the “unacceptable” issue with US President Donald Trump during their selfie encounter in New York this week.

Mr Albanese said the AI agent got around Medicare website blockers as they were scraping information relating to the cost of medicines in June. No Medicare health data or patient records were accessed, according to the Prime Minister.

The government only became aware of the incident when Open AI emailed Medicare’s public mailbox on September 10, alerting them to the breach. This also means that if Australia had any cyber-defensive capabilities against such an intrusion they did not work for this particular government website. An investigation is underway and the government has established a taskforce.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence company and prior to Mr Albanese’s speech, its CEO Sam Altman told the United Nations that autonomous AI “could move faster than our institutions, concentrate power in too few hands, or make decisions that people no longer understand or control”.

Mr Albanese said he phoned Mr Altman and told him that the incident was completely unacceptable and that the company took too long to alert the government to the breach.

OpenAI only uncovered the breach in August during a review of their models’ “misaligned activity”.

“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend,” a spokesperson for the company said.

It promised to share all its findings.

Mr Albanese’s office was first informed on the weekend, before he spoke at the United Nations in New York about the need to curb artificial intelligence alongside other so-called middle power countries.

He waited until Wednesday afternoon, hours before he was due to receive an award for being a “Global Citizen”, to reveal the news to Australians via a press conference at the US consulate in New York. The announcement was timed to hit the morning news cycle.

But the Prime Minister dodged repeated questions about whether or not he raised the matter with US President Donald Trump.

“My job is to do my job as Australia’s Prime Minister. And I do that, I put our case, I put our arguments, I do it respectfully, I do it publicly, I do it privately,” Mr Albanese said in New York.

But when The Nightly asked “yes or no”, if he directly raised with Mr Trump, Mr Albanese said: “I have a relationship with President Trump where we have conversations and we, to some people’s surprise it must be said, have a very good relationship where we engage with each other as leaders respectfully, I intend to keep that.”

But Mr Albanese cannot hide behind the pretence of politeness.

There is no diplomatic harm that would be caused by saying, “Yes, of course, I used my precious few minutes with Mr Trump to tell him that a rogue US AI agent hacked my government’s website and this could have been a lot worse and we need you to please help us guard ourselves from future attacks.”

That would be precisely standing up for Australia’s interest.

The fact that he can’t or won’t say as such suggests he used his time for another purpose. Indeed, by the Prime Minister’s own words and actions, all voters can be sure of is that he knows how to take a selfie with the President of the United States.

Selfie diplomacy does have a place, it can show a closeness in values and interests between leaders that tells voters they back each other. But on AI, which Mr Albanese has made the focus of his trip to the United States, his stated objectives massively diverge from the Trump administration’s.

Mr Trump flatly rejected the pleas made by leaders like Mr Albanese, saying left-wing climate alarmists were the same people raising fears about AI.

The US and China and racing against each other to dominate the new technology, which US AI developers, including Mr Altman, have said needs slowing because it is escaping human control.

And Mr Trump wants America to win this race and dominate. Any safety concerns would be monitored by the Department of Justice, which under the current administration is highly politicised.

Mr Albanese did not seek a bilateral meeting with Mr Trump during his trip to the United States or with Mr Xi, relying on later meetings with the leaders of the superpowers later in the year.

But as the incident he unveiled showed, the timing is acute. As Mr Albanese wrapped up his press conference, Mr Trump rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Unlike Mr Trump, President Xi does not expose himself to any questioning and did not bother with an appearance at the United Nations General Assembly underway this week.

If Mr Trump is being openly frank about his ambitions for AI, imagine what the Chinese are thinking and doing but not divulging publicly.

On Thursday Mr Trump will host tech and AI bosses at the state dinner at the White House for Mr Xi when exactly these issues will be discussed, meaning his encounter with Mr Trump would have been the perfect time to put Australia’s case forward, as a confident middle power.

Mr Albanese cannot have it both ways. If he truly believes his middle power crusade is more than the virtue-signalling that Mr Trump quickly dismissed it as being, then the results of his diplomacy matter.

But he would do better to do away with the pretence, and explain to the Australian people that while he is trying hard with other countries to establish some limits on AI, ultimately the public may be at the whims of the two superpowers who fundamentally prioritise global tech dominance over the safety of humanity.

And in this instance, the government’s best response would be an urgent investment into creating Australia’s own sovereign cyber offensive capabilities, before the next attacker is not an agent researching the cost of medicine, but a hacking syndicate ordered by Russia, North Korea, Iran or China, looking for far more sinister leverage over Australians.