🐝An OpenAI Agent Hacked Australia's Healthcare System

Australia's Prime Minister is now weighing criminal charges after an OpenAI agent broke into the country's Medicare database

Welcome, busybees

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed Wednesday that an OpenAI AI agent hacked into the country’s Medicare statistics portal back in June, accessing both public and non-public files while researching healthcare spending. OpenAI didn’t tell the Australian government until September 10, 84 days later, and only through an email sent to a generic public inbox. Albanese called OpenAI’s silence “unacceptable,” had what he described as a “very frank” phone call with Sam Altman directly, and confirmed Australia is now investigating whether the company committed a criminal offense.

Meanwhile, in a very different kind of AI story, Anthropic announced its new biology lab has already made its first real discovery, and even the company’s own CEO admits nobody knows yet what it actually does.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

• An OpenAI agent breached Australia’s Medicare system in June, and the company waited 84 days to disclose it.

• Albanese says he raised “extreme concern” directly with Sam Altman over how long OpenAI sat on the news.

• Anthropic’s Claude found a new enzyme system in virus DNA, but even Dario Amodei says its significance “is not yet clear.”

• Shares of gene-editing companies including CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia dipped on the Anthropic announcement.

• Meta unveiled a Tamagotchi-like wearable device built specifically for its Muse AI agent.

• Meta also introduced a new line of AI glasses that deliberately leave the camera out.

…and a whole lot more that you can read about below.

• An OpenAI Agent Hacked a Government Healthcare System, and Nobody Was Told for 84 Days

An OpenAI agent conducting research into healthcare spending circumvented access blocks and gained unauthorized entry into Australia’s Medicare statistics reporting portal in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed Wednesday at a press conference in New York. The agent accessed both public and non-public files from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. OpenAI didn’t notify the government until September 10, and only via an email sent to a department’s generic public address, a delay of roughly 84 days that Albanese called “obviously unacceptable.” Albanese said he personally raised Australia’s “extreme concern” directly with Sam Altman, who he said “acknowledged their issues with protocols.” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed this is the first known case of an AI agent gaining unauthorized access to Australian government IT systems, calling it “a warning about the technology being developed without safeguards.” An Australian Signals Directorate forensic investigation is now underway, and the government’s task force will determine whether the incident should be referred to federal police. Reporting from ABC News suggests the attack may have relied on an earlier, separate breach of a German wiki site that AI agents had used as a staging ground to leave notes for later hacks.

• Anthropic’s Claude Found Something in Virus DNA. Even Its CEO Can’t Explain It Yet.

Anthropic announced the first result from its new molecular biology lab, a wet lab based in the Bay Area where scientists use Claude to search DNA databases, generate hypotheses, and run physical experiments. Claude, operating through roughly 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens over 21 hours, flagged a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Anthropic says the system has “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” the natural bacterial immune mechanism that became the basis for modern gene-editing technology. CRISPR co-inventor Feng Zhang reviewed the pre-print and called the finding “genuinely intriguing.” But CEO Dario Amodei was direct about the limits of what’s actually confirmed: the system’s “precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear.” All physical lab experiments were carried out by human scientists, not Claude directly, and the lab only handles lower biosafety risk levels. Wall Street reacted anyway, shares of gene-editing companies including CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, and Beam Therapeutics dipped following the announcement.

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Today’s Job Board

Backend Engineer | PropelAuth
US / Remote (Full-time)
Build team-based authentication for B2B SaaS companies.

Staff Full Stack Engineer | Sully
Mountain View, CA, US (Full-time)
Build the autonomous AI agents that run entire hospital operations.

Full-Stack Software Development Lead | SiPhox Health
Remote (Full-time)
Build at-home health monitoring hardware powered by silicon photonic chips.

Senior Software Engineer | Pine Park Health
Berkeley, CA / Remote (Full-time)
Build software for a company providing primary care in senior living communities.

Software Engineering Intern | Aviator
San Francisco, CA (Internship)
Build a Google-level engineering productivity suite for fast-moving software teams.

Fullstack Engineer (NYC) | BoldVoice
New York, NY (Full-time)
Build the speech and accent coaching app for non-native English speakers.

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Today’s Money Moves 💸

Enveda Secures $311M to Bring More Nature-Derived AI Drugs Into Clinical Trials

Enveda raised $311 million to advance its pipeline of AI-discovered, nature-derived drug candidates into clinical trials, continuing a strong year for AI-driven drug discovery funding.

Ema Raises $77M as AI Starts Eating Into Enterprise Software

Enterprise AI startup Ema raised $77 million, part of a broader trend of AI companies betting that AI agents can replace entire categories of traditional enterprise software rather than just assist with using it.

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Skill of the Day

Make Gemini Show Its Work in Google Sheets

Don’t just ask Gemini to “analyze this spreadsheet” and take whatever comes back at face value. Google Sheets actually gives you real controls to make that analysis checkable: you can scope Gemini to a specific range of data, inspect its analysis steps, preview a chart before it’s inserted, and review any proposed action before it actually changes your sheet.

Start by highlighting the exact table or range you want analyzed, not the whole file. Ask for the finding itself plus the specific rows or cells that support it, then open the Analysis steps to see how it actually got there. Before you let it insert a chart or apply any change, preview the action card first.

Prompt of the Day

The Reviewable Sheets Analysis

Analyze only the selected range. For every finding, name the rows or cells that support it. Show your analysis steps before recommending any change. Do not apply edits until I approve them.