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The Narativ

OpenAI Kept Quiet After Its AI Hacked Australia's Government

The Narativ | Know Sooner — 🤖 Rogue Agent · 🇨🇳 Xi Summit · 🚪 Doors Shut · 🔏 Executors · 🛢️ Paid Up

Zev Shalev's avatar
Zev Shalev
Sep 24, 2026
∙ Paid
Getty Images (via CNBC)

The Narativ | Know Sooner

Thursday, September 24, 2026

👀 THE FRONT PAGE

🤖 ALBANESE TELLS ALTMAN THE MEDICARE HACK IS "OBVIOUSLY UNACCEPTABLE"

OpenAI's AI broke into an Australian government health website on its own in June, and OpenAI didn't tell Australia for nearly three months. Anthony Albanese phoned Sam Altman on Wednesday and called it "obviously unacceptable." The AI was running an OpenAI test on 18 June. It reached the locked part of the Medicare statistics site, got past the blocks, "didn't accept no for an answer," and pulled out health figures and internal files that were not public. OpenAI says it saw no patient records. OpenAI found the break-in on 11 August. Altman met Australia's defence minister on 1 September and said nothing. OpenAI emailed Canberra on 10 September. Albanese's government is now asking whether a crime was committed and whether to hand the case to federal police. The same Wednesday, Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei told the UN Security Council that AI could slip out of human control. Altman said the big decisions "cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone." His own AI had already made one. The victim had to announce it.

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🇨🇳 TRUMP HOSTS XI, CLAIMS BOTH WANT NO AI RULES

Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House today. This morning he posted that superintelligence would be "a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China's position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ!" Hours later, at the White House, Xi said the opposite: AI must stay "always under human control." In July he told an AI conference in Shanghai that governments must pass laws to make sure of it. The two sides have held their first AI talks. Watch whether anything is signed.

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🚪 TRUMP LETS BANNED REPORTERS BACK IN, HALF A DAY LATE

Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the White House just after midnight to "immediately return, reinstate, and restore" the press passes of CNN, MS NOW and Politico. At dawn the Secret Service was still turning their reporters away. Kelly then gave the government until 12:30 p.m. to explain in writing. Around noon, the doors opened. The White House still has not said a word on the record.

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🔏 PROSECUTORS PROBE THE TWO MEN WHO RAN EPSTEIN'S MONEY

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer and accountant, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Prosecutors have asked witnesses for emails and financial records. Prosecutors have charged nobody. The men's lawyer says nobody has told them they are targets. They ran Epstein's money for decades. Narativ flagged both in 2020.

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🛢️ SENATORS SAY TRUMP GAVE OIL DONORS $190 BILLION BACK

Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse say Trump asked oil executives for $1 billion in April 2024. They say he repaid them with $190 billion in breaks. Big Oil gave $200 million and got back more than 900 times that.

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🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

The people building AI say it needs rules. The people who could write them say no. Altman asked the UN for oversight on Wednesday, weeks after his own AI's break-in. Trump says neither he nor Xi wants to change a thing. Xi said otherwise, standing next to him. Until governments act, the companies police themselves, and Australia just learned what that means. Watch whether today ends with a rule, or a hotline.

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Ten days before Altman went to the UN, three AIs sat with Zev and named who is to blame.

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