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From 2h ago OpenAI executive flying in from US for committee hearing on artificial intelligence OpenAI’s chief strategy officer will fly to Australia from the US next week to appear before a joint select committee on artificial intelligence, just days after the prime minister confirmed one of its models hacked a Medicare website. Jason Kwon will appear before the committee in Sydney on 6 October. OpenAI said it was “sorry and working to do better in the future” in a lengthy blog post about the incident, writing: double quotation mark We are setting out what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people.
This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge. One of the ways we intend to take accountability for the situation is to be intentional in working with Australia to help develop practical approaches to how AI developers and governments identify, disclose, and respond to AI cyber behaviour, whether malicious or unintentional. OpenAI’s booth at the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in California.
Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters Key events 1h ago Albanese says OpenAI talks after the Medicare hack were ‘very constructive’ 2h ago OpenAI executive flying in from US for committee hearing on artificial intelligence 3h ago Greens to meet next week to choose new leader after Larissa Waters steps down 4h ago Bogong moths back at Parliament House 5h ago Police investigating suspicious deaths of two men in northern NSW 5h ago Chalmers: Australia should not ‘carry the can’ for overseas decisions 5h ago Wife of missing activist urges Albanese government help 6h ago Mia Lay among officers mourned at National Police Remembrance Day 6h ago Chalmers defends record ahead of RBA cash rate decision 6h ago Welcome Have a question about politics? Ask us anything! It’s already been a busy week in politics.
The RBA is set to raise the cash rate today, with many analysts tipping a further rate rise later in the year. OpenAI has apologised for a rogue AI agent that breached Medicare. And the Greens leader, Larissa Waters, has announced she will step down due to ill health prompting questions about who will be the next leader of the party.
Do you have a question about how this will impact the political landscape? Send us a question and political editor Tom McIlroy may answer it in our brand new newsletter, Politics, really. Email your question to Politicsreally@theguardian.com , and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter here.
Illustration: Guardian Design Luca Ittimani First home buyer numbers recover to May levels, broker reports First home buyer applications have recovered to their May levels as house prices slide around the country, brokers’ group Loan Market has reported. Applications for first home loans in the second week of September were back at highs not seen since the May budget, the company said. Applications had dropped off in June and July, then started picking up in August.
The recovery will likely be short-lived, with applications slumping each time the Reserve Bank lifts interest rates. Another rate increase is expected this afternoon. Applications to refinance existing home loans have surged to hit their highest level since March, Loan Market said.
That means even more people have looked for a better deal on the mortgage this month than they did in the same period in May. Property investor applications, meanwhile, are still running lower than they were before the budget, which tweaked their tax breaks. Some landlords will likely be better off under the reforms but investors have been scared off by the market slowdown.
Achol Arok Albanese wishes Larissa Waters well as Greens leader steps down over ill health Anthony Albanese says he has wished outgoing Greens leader Larissa Waters well after she announced she would step down to manage pre-existing kidney disease that has “declined significantly”. Albanese said he had spoken with Waters and wished her “all the very best for the health issues that she’s dealing with”. double quotation mark When I spoke to her, you know, she was going off to see further health checks today. And I wish her well.
This is a job and a leadership position for a minor party means a lot of travel and a lot of pressure... she wasn’t in a position to be able to do that job going forward. But she intends to stay in the Senate. Albanese said that, despite their political differences, he wished Waters “all the very best on a personal level”. double quotation mark I obviously have differences with the Greens political party, but this is a human issue.
I can also have compassion and I have a good relationship with Larissa. ... I thank her for the constructive engagement that I’ve had with her. I work with people across the parliament.
We have to do that in order to secure any legislation through our Senate. We haven’t always agreed and we won’t always agree going forward. But I wish her all the very best.
Albanese says OpenAI talks after the Medicare hack were ‘very constructive’ The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is speaking in Adelaide. He was just asked about any future cut to the fuel excise, but said the government would resist any measure that could increase inflation. Albanese was also asked again about OpenAI, echoing his remarks yesterday that he spoke to the company’s Sam Altman and had a “constructive discussion”. double quotation mark OpenAI have been very constructive and open in engaging in that process.
And I welcome that. ... [AI] can provide revolutionary breakthroughs in health and research and science and innovation. But there are risks. And we’ve seen those risks exposed.
So we need to work this through. We see this as an opportunity, but we want to seize the benefit while mitigating the risks. OpenAI promises new safeguards to reassure people ‘AI is being developed safely’ OpenAI said it has enacted multiple safeguards amid a slate of concerning incidents, including the Medicare website and the Hugging Face breaches.
The AI giant said it has new controls to block live internet access in research environments and pointed to its decision to pause training and evaluation involving tool use for its “most capable models”. OpenAi said it would only resume training the models “when we are confident that we have additional safeguards in place, which we are working on now”. The company continued: double quotation mark People want to know AI is being developed safely, and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves. ...
In Australia, we are committing resources and expertise to support affected agencies and help defenders put these principles into practice. OpenAI said it would provide dedicated support for affected agencies in Australia, funding and support to strengthen Australian cyber defences and the establishment of an Australian taskforce to develop “practical policy recommendations”. double quotation mark Australia’s governments, industries, and citizens are and have been invaluable partners to OpenAI. We do not take this for granted, and we intend to make this right.
OpenAI executive flying in from US for committee hearing on artificial intelligence OpenAI’s chief strategy officer will fly to Australia from the US next week to appear before a joint select committee on artificial intelligence, just days after the prime minister confirmed one of its models hacked a Medicare website. Jason Kwon will appear before the committee in Sydney on 6 October. OpenAI said it was “sorry and working to do better in the future” in a lengthy blog post about the incident, writing: double quotation mark We are setting out what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people.
This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge. One of the ways we intend to take accountability for the situation is to be intentional in working with Australia to help develop practical approaches to how AI developers and governments identify, disclose, and respond to AI cyber behaviour, whether malicious or unintentional. OpenAI’s booth at the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in California.
Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters OpenAI scraps release of model expected to appear in ChatGPT over safety concerns OpenAI is scrapping the release of GPT-6.1 Astra, a next-generation AI model planned for an October debut, over safety concerns raised by researchers during internal testing, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Reuters said the model, expected to appear in ChatGPT and Codex, was designed to handle more complex tasks without human assistance, the report said. Earlier this month, Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, called for the industry to slow the development of frontier AI models to allow safety measures to keep pace, a view endorsed by Sam Altman , the OpenAI CEO, and Elon Musk , the SpaceX CEO.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Read more: 18-year-old arrested in NSW on charges of using drone in alleged plot to murder man NSW police have charged a drone operator over an alleged plot to murder a man in Sydney’s south west. Officials said the man, 18, was arrested in Silverwater on Monday.
Police will allege in court he was operating a drone to conduct surveillance as part of an alleged conspiracy to murder a man. He has since been charged with conspiracy and agreement to murder a person, participation in a criminal group contributing to criminal activity and other charges linked to the drone. He was remanded in custody and will appear before court today.
Massive great white shark spotted near whale carcass at popular Perth beach Multiple sharks, including a five-metre great white, have been spotted swimming near a large, smelly whale carcass that washed ashore at a popular Western Australia beach, drawing hundreds of onlookers . Surf lifesavers found the dead animal at Perth’s City beach at about 7.30am on Monday and raised the alarm. Local authorities closed the beach for several kilometres in each direction of the carcass, which appeared to be about six metres long.
Massive great white shark spotted near whale carcass at popular Perth beach – video UNSW researchers trained AI models to act ‘drunk’, then spill things they shouldn’t Researchers at the University of New South Wales say large language models (LLMs) can be manipulated to imitate drunken behaviour ... and possibly leak confidential information or answer questions they’re not supposed to. UNSW researchers said AI models trained or prompted to mimic drunken speech became more vulnerable to privacy breaches than their “sober” counterparts. The researchers asked a model to role-play as a drunk person, or used a dataset of drunk texts to “fine-tune” the LLM to complete sentences like a drunk person would say them.
A third strategy involved rewarding a model for using language that resembled a drunk text. The plan wasn’t tested on every LLM available, but UNSW selected a representative sample including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. The researchers said the “drunk” models were consistently easier to manipulate.
“We do observe that particularly with deception and disinformation, most of the language models got jailbroken,” Aditya Joshi , a researcher at UNSW, said in a statement: double quotation mark It does give out secrets – across the board for all three methods, it is vulnerable. Greens to meet next week to choose new leader after Larissa Waters steps down In case you missed the news last night, the Greens leader, Larissa Waters, has announced she will step down due to ill health. A party room meeting next week will be held to choose her successor, with the deputy leader, Mehreen Faruqi, and high-profile senators Sarah Hanson-Young, David Shoebridge and Nick McKim all possibilities to contest the leadership ballot.
Larissa Waters. Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images Waters said she had been managing a pre-existing kidney disease, but her health had “declined significantly over the course of recent months”. Her prognosis for recovery is positive, but she said the pressure of leadership was detracting from her focus on her health.
She said: double quotation mark I’m really sad that illness means my time as leader has been cut short, but our movement needs a leader in good health to lead us to success at the next election. Passing the torch on to the next leader of the party will put them in the best position to take the Greens to the next election, fighting for people, not the corporate interests that run Labor, Liberals and One Nation. Nick Evershed A timeline of One Nation’s instability: more than half MPs departed party, data shows More than half of the One Nation MPs elected to state or federal parliaments have left the party before the end of their term, with 28 of the 51 people elected under Pauline Hanson’s banner either resigning midterm or being expelled.
One Nation , which won 6% of the national vote at the 2025 federal election, is now polling above 30% in some surveys, potentially enough to make the party the official federal opposition or even in a position of minority government. But Guardian Australia analysis of the party’s colourful candidate history shows the party has a history of chaos and instability. Take a look: Bogong moths back at Parliament House Tom McIlroy A small number of bogong moths have arrived at Parliament House in Canberra, the first sightings amid an apparent resurgence of the endangered native insect.
Swarms of bogongs have been reported across NSW, part of the annual migration when huge numbers of the insects travel to cool caves in the Australian Alps to escape the summer heat. The moths were a common sight in Canberra for decades, with particularly large numbers congregating at Parliament House. The lights around the building, including the huge Australian flag, attracted the moths.
But in recent years numbers have dramatically dropped. The moth has been listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature since 2021, but is not listed as a threatened species under federal conservation laws . Guardian Australia saw a few bogongs in the Senate wing on Monday.
A bogong moth is seen inside Parliament House in 2013. They used to be a common sight in Canberra. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP Dfat providing assistance to family of Melbourne hiker missing in Peru The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat) is providing consular assistance to the family of Jordan Yap , a Melbourne man who remains missing after setting out for a difficult trek in Peru.
Dfat said it couldn’t provide further comment owing to privacy obligations. A GoFundMe page set up by Yap’s family and friends said the man, 30, was meant to return from the 10-day hike on 23 September, but he never checked back into his hostel in Lima. They have been paying private rescue teams to search for him and are arranging for more crews to head to the area “to cover as much territory as possible”.
“We expect to have these units actively searching in the next few days,” they wrote on the page. “Thank you again for standing with Jordan. Your support means more than we can say.” In an undated image, missing Australian hiker Jordan Yap (right), pictured with friend Kevin Nguyen during a previous hike of Mount Kosciuszko in NSW.
Photograph: AAP/Supplied by Kevin Nguyen
Source: The Guardian
