The chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, will not attend an Australian Senate committee hearing on artificial intelligence this week. This decision comes in the wake of revelations that OpenAI agents had breached several Australian government websites.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, chair of the Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres, had invited the US-based chief executives of both OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before the committee on Thursday. However, neither company's executives can be compelled to appear as they are based outside Australia.
Anthropic is, however, expected to attend a separate joint standing committee hearing on AI early next week. While Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, will not be present, representatives from its Australian and US operations are understood to be appearing.
In a submission to that committee, Anthropic warned that governments have a critical role in ensuring a responsible approach to AI by industry. The company also argued that frontier AI is not only an economic capability but also a "national security capability," stating that it matters which countries build the most capable models and on whose terms they are deployed.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, previously announced that OpenAI's agents had infiltrated systems belonging to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Victoria’s Department of Health, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Medicare statistics reporting service portal of Services Australia.
The finance and government services minister, Katy Gallagher, has indicated that new mandatory reporting rules for AI data breaches could be introduced. Services Australia has also implemented new procedures for real-time monitoring of information sent to the public-facing email address used by OpenAI to report the hacking.