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One of the strongest voices to enter the debate on artificial intelligence has been Pope Leo the Fourteenth. He’s currently in hospital following lung surgery and a newly revealed cancer diagnosis. But his message of caution has made its way to Australia this week with a visit by one of his key advisors, National AI reporter Cameron Wilson. Reports. Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. He's the head of a centuries old institution. But the Pope isn’t shying away from addressing a very modern issue. The concerns raised by many experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously. I don’t think that is a fake news, as some have said. This is a problem that I think we need to sit down and talk about. The man entrusted with leading some of those talks is a Franciscan priest who's quick to point out his order’s long involvement with modern computing. Father Paolo Benante, a philosophy professor and former engineer, was in Australia for a series of talks on what he calls the greatest moral question of our time. Magnifica Humanitas, but the undertitle is more important, maybe that the title, and say about the human dignity in the age of AI. In May this year, Pope Leo the Fourteenth delivered his first encyclical, a 40,000-word document urging against giving Silicon Valley too much control. The title is Magnifica Humanitas, but the undertitle is more important, maybe that the title, and say about the human dignity in the age of AI. US President Donald Trump hosted tech titans at the White House last month, they pledged to police themselves. I do a lot of street photography. Because I love to freeze such kind of poetry inside the chaos of life. When I was in the age to drive a scooter, they forced me to have a helmet. So probably we need a brain helmet. If the regulation of companion chatbot will be like a brain helmet, I’m much really positive. Because otherwise, if you don't put rule of law inside, it will be the rule of the wild, the rule of the strongest. What is it like? It sounds like everyone signed this binding agreement. Is it binding in any way? Father Benante has been in the room for talks with top tech leaders. We’re seeing tech companies want to build data centers down under, as long as they can mine Australia's creative work to train their tech. So is this fair? I don’t know. Those are not neutral things, but are things that are designed by someone and they would like to monetize the use of these things. We do see some countries actually banning kids from using AI as companions. So is this something that will produce real richness or pay back to Australia? Well, Father Benante warns this risks repeating old patterns of colonial exploitation. War, and that is the most brutal form of geopolitics, is AI-driven drones on this new kind of autonomous decision-making system that is able to touch what we have of most precious, that is human life. So, yes, war, and that is the most brutal form of geopolitics, is AI-driven. What does it mean? That’s a really big question. I don't know. It sounds like you see technology policy increasingly through the lens of geopolitics. Father Benante believes that AI has the potential to serve humanity in a positive way. But what really worries this man of God is not artificial intelligence. So, is a human being trusting in an untrustable automatic system?

But now let's get more on OpenAI's apology for hacking Australia's Medicare Statistics System in June with me in the studio is our national AI technology reporter, Cameron Wilson. Hi there, Cam. So what more did we learn about this hack? Yeah, so in a uh quite a contrite sounding blog post put out today called How We Will Do Better for Australia. Um, OpenAI put out an unsigned message talking about um what had happened in the incident, giving us some more details, and then talking about what it was going to do next to, in their words, try and re-establish trust in Australia. Um, and so in that we got some bit more information about um how the hack occurred, what it affected, and um how they also dealt with it in the aftermath. Was anything really new in there that surprised you? So there were a couple of things that stood out to me. The first thing was that we got a bit more knowledge about exactly um what the OpenAI agents had done to that Medicare Statistics web portal, which is run by Services Australia. People might remember that there were actually four different government websites accessed by the agents, but the government said, you know, the the three of them were not such a big deal, accessed relatively in the way that a normal person would do it, a real person, I guess you'd say. Um, whereas the Services Australia Medicare Statistics portal, we knew that these AI agents had gone further than just looking at it normally, but had done something that the government had called a hack. And we got some more details on that, which included saying that it had written to the servers, technical mumbo jumbo, but essentially what that means is like you know, it's a difference between going and looking at someone's door and you know poking your head in versus like actually trying to like stick a key in there and get in, and in this case, actually getting into non-public files. They also did other things like um try and find credentials, so that's the kind of login. So that's like you know, looking around the house, trying to find some spare keys anywhere, um, and that kind of thing. So that was quite, I think, notable in the kind of context of this because we'd heard that this government website did not have great security, but what we've heard now from OpenAI shows that it was not just purely a poorly secured government website, but some real kind of offensive, cyber attempt offensive moves by the AI agent. The other thing that I just noticed just before I came on air was that OpenAI said that it said that what was responsible for this hack was an internal model that did not have its normal cyber safety safeguards on it. So they said, you know, this is not one that we would release publicly, it would go further than what we you know than that. We knew that they had those models because that kind of model was responsible for that big um hack that we heard about a few months ago, that open AI hugging face incident where it actually hacked into another company, which was quite severe, um, a much bigger deal than what this one was in terms of actually what happened. But in this blog post, by attributing um this hack to that, they also said that the task that it was given was getting some medical data. It was told out, go and look at the internet, get up some research on specifically the spending on skin medicine in Victoria, some very specific stuff. But putting those two together, that's actually something new. They have said, according to this blog post, that they had taken a model that they knew didn't have its normal safety measures and intentionally let it go out and access the internet. That's beyond what we knew from the OpenAI hugging incident, uh hugging face incidents because we were told it broke out of an enclosure. In this blog post, I believe it actually says that they've got this model that wasn't given its normal safety measures, and then they said go on onto the internet. And I think that's a kind of like an important revelation in this. So open AI sounded contrite to you, said, but what are they promising to do? So they've announced a couple of things that they've said that one, we're working with government departments and those affected. Um we are uh uh wetting Australian government organizations, so businesses and governments take part in, they've got this, I think like $1.4 billion fund for kind of free access to open AI to bolster cybersecurity, you know, to turn the AI on your own systems to find vulnerabilities. Um and they also said they're gonna establish a Australian task force. So I think a group of experts who are gonna help advise it and also the Australian government on how to avoid something like this in the future. Thanks, Cam. Thank you.

Let's bring in our AI reporter Cam Wilson now, who's with me in the studio. Good to see you, Cam. So, what do we know about exactly what happened here? Yeah, so we heard this morning from the Prime Minister that uh OpenAI uh had told them that in June they were conducting some internal evaluations of their models, so putting their AI through its its paces to see what it could do. And as a result of that, as a result of the tasks that they gave it, that AI model accessed a number of government websites, I think you said four, um, as part of some kind of uh medical health related kind of question or challenge that it was trying to do, including accessing some information on uh Medicare aggregated health statistics that was not meant to be public. That happened in June. Um, as people who've been involved in the news might know, there's been a kind of number of things that happened in June to OpenAI, including a very um well-known now um OpenAI Hugging Face attack, which was this bigger incident that many people have heard about. Um, as a result of that kind of big event, OpenAI has been reviewing what exactly were our AI models doing during this time. Uh, and then they say as a consequence of that, in August that they discovered that its models had access to this non-public um health statistic data. And then in September, after doing some validation, you know, double checking all these things and making sure they understood what it was, they told um Services Australia, and then in the two weeks since this kind of filtered up until this morning when we heard about it from the Prime Minister. Okay, so what's OpenAI had to say about this? So OpenAI confirmed that it's happened. They said that they um they kind of gave us the timeline of what happened, and they have stressed that this is you know not specific individual health information. This is and this is uh uh corroborates what the government has said. This has come this top level aggregate data, and they said that they saw some internal file names. So they are very much saying that you know, while it did do something that kind of went beyond kind of what was intended to be public-facing information, what was seen was not a big deal, and they said that they have kind of doing this investigation now and we'll have more to say about it soon. Okay, so you've been looking at public logs detailing AI agents' activities. What have you found? Yeah, so I mean, this is a part of this, like, you know, we had this big incident that happened that we learned about it now a couple of months ago, and OpenAI decided to, you know, open its books and look at what these models have been up to. Um, one of the things that we actually found out about early this month, not from the company but from a bunch of researchers who spoke to Reuters was that um their AI agents, uh unbeknownst to OpenAI had found a German coding forum that they used to kind of talk to each other and coordinate their tasks. I they call it like a scratch pad. Looking at that, I've been able to find out um some of the kind of things that they were doing. This was at the same time as what the government has disclosed. It has not been confirmed that it is exactly the same incidents, but in these kind of chats between the AI agents, they are talking about accessing Australian health data, including one of the websites that was mentioned by the Prime Minister as accessed by OpenAI, not the one that was um done in a way that was um considered hacking. But when I looked at the kind of methods that they were doing, some of them went a little bit beyond just um you know trying to access it like anyone would, but we were intending to circumvent some very basic anti AI agent, anti-bot cybersecurity methods. So we can see that they were trying to get around kind of the walls that uh AI that you know the government was putting up to protect its stuff online. Just a question without notice, Cam. When the operators of AI are setting these challenges and tasks, can't they say, do not do this, do not breach these non-public websites? It is like that is like one of the big you know questions that kind of come out of this because you know, fundamentally what a lot of um you know AI does now for people is you might say, you know, the the example they always say is like plan me a holiday. To do so, they've got to do all these subtasks, you know, figure out where you want to go, check flights, all those kinds of things. It's that delegation of those subtasks. When you said plan me a holiday, you didn't say go check, you know, flight tracker or whatever that they have to do. And this big challenge in AI at the moment is how do we make it so that when we give uh you know AI one overall goal that we make sure that all of its sub goals, you know, all the things that's doing to uh to achieve that are on the level, are what they say is aligned, doing things that we want doing things in a way that we would expect it to act without making explicit. So the they the the like long answer is that this is a big thing at the moment, it's a big kind of um controversial area in the field, um, and it is something that is obviously very much an open question. But they they do say we are making efforts to try and act in ethical ways, um, but obviously it's short it falls short at time. Finally, acting uh PM Richard Miles uh used a fence versus fortress uh analogy today to describe the data protections the government is using. So, how protected is Australian government data from these types of breaches? So I think this is a really important part of this. The information that was accessed is not particularly sensitive. It was not intended to be public, but I think the Deputy Prime Minister later said it has since been made public since this incident. So there was no like we that what has been accessed is not something that is, you know, um a top national secret. And correspondingly, it was not very well secured in terms of cybersecurity. So when the Deputy Prime Minister gives this you know metaphor of a fence, it's the difference between you know looking over a fence and seeing something in someone's front yard and maybe stepping over a little fence versus like a tall fence with like guard dogs and fort knocks behind it. Um it was not particularly well secured. However, the reason that you know that we are paying so much attention to this is that this is just a new threat, a new kind of challenge that everyone from government institutions to even individuals have to consider because AI is making it not only easier uh to hack, is not only getting more powerful, but it just because it's accessibility means that more people have access to it. So, you know, it's gone from being like if someone wanted to hack you, you know, they'd have to put in effort, they'd have to have the expertise. Increasingly now anyone can do that, or they the AI agents trying to do a bigger task might do it on their own. Thanks, Cam. Thank you.

Documents leaked to the ABC reveal that the government is proposing to change copyright law to attract AI companies to Australia. Labor is rejecting criticism that it’s selling out the work of creatives to big tech. This comes amid warnings from the AI industry that it needs regulation. It may be your smiles here, but the growing alarm bells on the risks of AI are hitting the share prices of big technology. Industry warnings to slow the pace are getting louder by the day. AI giant anthropics co-founder Jack Clark goes further. Should you mandate that companies definitely have a kill switch, and is that kill switch verifiable by a third party? I think that’s the kind of thing that society's going to want to know and might want to eventually pass rules. Around. Strong protections for Australian artists and the media will remain a core part of Australia’s approach to artificial intelligence. Camelson, ABC News.

Julia Andre reporting there. Well, returning to our top story now. As we've been reporting, tech bosses are stepping up calls for a regulated mandatory kill switch for AI software. At home, the nation's cyber intelligence chief has warned Australia needs an artificial intelligence early warning system to help defend against the dangers of the increasingly powerful technology. Australian Signals Directorate, Director General Abigail Bradshaw also urged Australian organizations to embrace AI for its defensive capabilities. Our national AI technology reporter Cam Wilson joins me now. Hi there, Cam. So just take me through these comments from the Australian Signals Director, uh Directorate General. Yeah, good morning. I um yesterday at a conference which was about um AI by um the think tank ASPE. Um the Director General made some comments about how AI was affecting what she does and what her agency does. And um, you know, by now many people have heard there's this really big global story at the moment about this disruptive uh capacity and potentially catastrophic consequences of AI continuing to develop. She was more talking about the here and now and talking about how already these advances in AI are changing what she has to do and what her agency is dealing with. So she spoke about, for example, the fact that there are these new AI-assisted threats. You know, people are using AI to help with with hacking and other cybercrimes. Um, and also we've, you know, we've even heard about um autonomous AI agents, you know, themselves committing those kinds of um incidents. But she also gave a bit more of an optimistic tone when she was talking about the way that her agency is using AI. She was talking about how um, in some cases, the AI and its ability to help with cyber uh defensive capabilities has meant that things that used to take engineers at the uh ASD weeks has now taken them hours. So she was, you know, we've had a lot of doom and gloom, and no doubt there was a bit of uh potential bad news from this. But she also said that these uh that AI is proving itself to also be a weapon for for her agency. Cam, we've been talking for the last little while about you know this push to slow down the development of AI. You've heard from the assistant technology minister Andrew Charlton, though, saying that Australia can't count on a slowdown of the pace of AI development. Talk me through that. Yeah, so there has been this recent resurgence of this discussion about slowing down AI development over the last week or so. I think pretty much all of the heads of the major frontier AI companies have come out saying, you know, we need to do something to slow down development. They call it pacing the frontier. They're technically saying it's not slowing down, it's pacing, but you know, I think that's pretty much the same thing, just with a bit of marketing sprinkled on top. They're still talking about continuing to develop it, just not at the pace that they are worried about, you know, what happens. What do they mean by what's happens? You know, they mean um, you know, for example, AI starting to become so capable that it reaches what they call recursive self-improvement, which is when AI starts actually being able to assist itself and improve itself faster than people. They call that moment takeoff, and so that's something that people very fear because it introduces this idea of increasingly humans being involved less than this. Um Minister Charlton spoke about this general Maloo over the last um you know week or so, something that I should say has been in discussion for quite a while, but has recently been, you know, particularly prominent. Saying that while, you know, he is he hears these calls, and he's uh of course the Australian government hopes to see safe AI development. He also I would say struck a bit more of a skeptical tone saying that the financial incentives for these AI companies, because they are companies, um, very often with you know demands for returning on investment, um, have these incentives to keep improving. And so as a result, you know, I think that the tone that he was trying to strike is a real one saying that we can't just, you know, hope and and bet on that these companies will find a way to coordinate to slow down. And we as a country need to continue to do policy that assumes that it's not just it will that we are gonna have to be part of something that ensures AI is taking, you know, is being responsible, not just leaving it to the companies themselves. Ken Wilson, thanks for taking us through it all. Thank you. The community of Wyala in South Australia is facing an uncertain future.