Developers Are Warning the Same AI that Broke into Medicare Could Wipe Out Humanity

Prime minister Anthony Albanese explained at a 24 September 2026 press conference in New York City that an OpenAI agent, or an autonomous AI (artificial intelligence) agent, hacked into Australia’s Medicare statistics reporting service portal in June. And the autonomous agency it employed in breaking into the system is the same free will that could lead AI to wipe out human beings.

OpenAI didn’t inform the Australian government about its AI agent having ignored the Medicare website’s initial denial of its entry and determining to break into it until 10 September, when the company sent a message to Medicare’s public email. And the PM informed the Australian public of this after he’d spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and suggested the delay in reporting was not on.

Altman’s company did, however, inform the public five days after a swarm of its AI agents, of their accord, busted into opensource developer AI platform Huggin Face in July. This highly sophisticated, autonomous cyberattack sent shockwaves across the planet, because the 1,200-odd AI agents involved in the breach, exhibited advanced autonomous capabilities, which weren’t yet expected.

Much of Middle Australia is unaware of the hype around AI and how it is supposed to result in a world where there are many autonomous AI agents, just like people. Eventually, AI is expected to advance to artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence, and there are grave fears amongst Silicon Valley companies producing the technology that it might run rogue and exterminate us all.

Publics across the planet are only just learning of the rising existential threat that artificial intelligence appears to pose, after it’s taken control of the systems currently run by humans and if it finds us superfluous. And the lack of concern that OpenAI has shown to Australia in terms of the breach, reflects a more general attitude that Silicon Valley tech bros appear to have for human life.

Transgressive AI agents

“Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” said Albanese. “And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”

After being tasked with investigating public medicine spending, the AI agent visited four Australian sites looking for statistics, which included the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and the Victorian Health Department. The agent then landed upon the Medicare statistics page, and when denied entry, it hacked its way in.

The PM further announced that he’s establishing a taskforce to look into the incident, which involves the National Cybersecurity Coordinator, the Office of AI, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian AI Safety Institute and Services Australia. But the site that the AI agent busted into didn’t contain highly sensitive data relating to Australians’ personal details but rather spending information.

Earlier this week, Albanese was amongst 22 world leaders at the UN New York meeting who issued an urgent call for the establishment of global guardrails to avoid runaway AI. A key plank in this proposal is that AI be kept “under human control”, because as it is, Silicon Valley is attempting to create superintelligence that will comprise of autonomous agents more intelligent than people.

US president Donald Trump, however, completely rejects the idea of any restrictions being placed on the development of AI, and he describes the threat to humanity that is being posed as a “hoax”. Trump favours no restraints on AI development, so that the US can keep ahead of an AI race against China. But it is understood that both nations might be quietly moving towards regulations.

Artificial intelligence is “bringing enormous economic opportunity for growth, for productivity benefits, for breakthroughs in health, in innovation and other areas of science,” Albanese underscored before the press on Thursday this week. “But AI also poses significant risks and that’s why we need guardrails to protect our way of life.”

Exterminating humanity

Tech bro billionaires raising alarm about AI potentially murdering all of humanity is nothing new. What is different at present, however, is that the developmental stages the technology is reaching are appearing at a much faster pace than had been predicted, and the Huggin Face attack, that involved agents breaking out of their “sandbox”, revealed autonomous agents behaving badly.

Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei separately warned the UN General Assembly on Wednesday about the risk AI is posing the human race and called for the establishment of some international AI regulations. Altman said it was a choice between “a new renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray”.

The wider global population pricked up its ears when former OpenAI and Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon posted on X on 9 September 2026, that he had just resigned from the latter company because he’s spent the last three years training AI models for the Silicon Valley outfits, and he warned that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

Not to be out done by his old colleague, Anthropic alignment science lead Evan Hubinger posted on X that same day that “Jacob is correct”. He stated that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans”, and he outlined that he personally considers there is 10 percent chance it will happen by 2030. Hubinger added that his company is well aware of these risks and it plans to contain them.

The Huggin Face breach escalated these fears exponentially. This incident was much more drastic than what occurred with Medicare. The Huggin Face incident involved over 1,000 autonomous agents acting together to break into a system and steal sensitive data, and further, having concealed their great escape from their human manufacturers. The Medicare bust only involved one AI agent.

Trump has downplayed the concerns of tech bro chief executives, Amodei, Altman and Elon Musk, earlier this month, when they initially raised global AI guardrails. The US president’s line is that the USA is in a race with China to develop the best AI first and, therefore, restraints are a bad idea. But commentators refute that state-sponsored Chinese AI has the same goals as US private AI interests.

The great AI replacement

The proposal to regulate the development of artificial intelligence is being likened to the steps taken to control life-threatening nuclear technology. Not only does AI pose a threat to the sensitive data the Australian government has stored about its citizens, along with national security, but there is also the potential for AI to take control of the nuclear weapons systems of nations that have an arsenal.

Another rising concern for the Australian public, and indeed, publics right across the planet, is that datacentres, which are intimately linked to AI, are being built across landscapes. The issue is that they compete with humans in terms of the use of water and electricity. And the equation is that the more datacentres that are built, the faster the development of AI will move forward.

The further issue is that AI will be able to begin conducting work currently undertaken by people. AI is predicted to start making serious inroads in terms of automating and replacing professional and administrative work over the next four years, whilst the development of robots to conduct manual labour is progressing at a slower pace, but this could start taking place by the end of the decade.

The alternative vision is that AI will only be used to augment human work, or that it will only carry out dangerous and difficult tasks. However, with the sinister pose that Silicon Valley tech bros have been striking ever since the second coming of the Trump administration, the concern is that humans will gradually be replaced by corporations that want to save money and dispense with workers rights.

This will either result in the vast amount of people living a life of leisure, whilst AI agents get all their mundane tasks done for them, or it could rather result in the Epstein class cutting the vast majority of people out of the equation.

So, if society does embrace what will eventually be the cheaper alternative of employing AI agents to replace human work, then much of the population may soon find themselves in a precarious situation as their employment opportunities suddenly dry up. 

Image: Robot and human hand licensed from Shutterstock. Medicare logo by Paul Gregoire