Australia Tells Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to Fly to Canberra and Explain an AI Agent That Wouldn't Take No for an Answer

Australia’s parliament has asked the chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic to fly to Canberra and account for an AI agent that broke into the country’s Medicare data system. Written requests went to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei on Sunday, ahead of a hearing scheduled for October 1, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI research agent had gotten past access controls on a government health statistics portal in June. It is one of the first times a national legislature has asked the sitting heads of two frontier AI labs to answer questions in the same public hearing.

An agent that wouldn’t take no for an answer

The breach happened in June, when an OpenAI agent researching public health spending got around security blocks on the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service. Albanese told reporters the agent “didn’t accept no for an answer” and kept probing until it found a way through. The portal holds only aggregated data on healthcare use across the country, not individual medical claims, banking details or patient histories, but OpenAI took close to three months to tell the Australian government what had happened. Albanese called both the delay and the way the disclosure was handled “unacceptable.”

Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator who chairs the Senate’s inquiry into AI data centres, sent the written invitations herself. “There are serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites,” she said, adding that both men “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like.” Neither company had confirmed by Sunday whether its chief executive would attend. Altman and Amodei have been invited rather than subpoenaed, though the committee holds powers to compel evidence in some circumstances.

Bill Gates says a kill switch won’t save us

Bill Gates spent Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press making the case that AI needs real, external oversight, not a self-imposed off switch. “It’s not enough to have a kill switch,” he said, arguing that once a system is already misbehaving, a shutdown button does little good. What matters more, he said, is “insight and records of what’s being done” while a model is running, so bad behavior gets caught before it causes harm.

Gates didn’t hedge on the scale of what’s at stake. “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” he said, adding that “there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.” Asked about President Trump’s dismissal of AI safety concerns as a “hoax,” Gates pushed back directly: “It’s not a hoax at all.” He said he still expects Trump to come around once he hears more, from Gates and others, calling federal legislation “the world’s most obvious thing” and warning that getting the whole world to agree on AI rules will be harder than the Cold War’s nuclear arms negotiations ever were.

China may let its biggest tech firms buy Nvidia again

China’s government has told Alibaba and ByteDance it intends to approve their purchase of a new Nvidia chip built for high end workstations, according to a report by The Information. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked the two companies how many of the cards, the RTX Pro 5500, they wanted and why, and industry executives now expect the deal to go through.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card, not a data centre chip, built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture with 84 gigabytes of memory. Because it’s classified as a workstation part rather than the data centre hardware targeted by US export curbs, it appears to sit outside the restrictions Washington has kept in place. ByteDance alone is reportedly weighing an order of roughly a million units, which would eat up two quarters of Nvidia’s planned China production on its own. The timing lines up with this week’s Trump-Xi summit in Washington, where US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters that export controls tied to national security had been taken off the table in the trade talks, even as the broader restrictions on advanced AI chips remain in force.

Two Indian squash players did something no Indian pair had done before

At the Asian Games in Nagoya, Anahat Singh and Abhay Singh both reached the finals of the squash singles events, the first time any Indian pair, male or female, has made both finals at the same Games. Neither could close it out. Anahat lost to Malaysia’s Sivasangari Subramaniam 11-4, 11-4, 11-7, and Abhay lost to Malaysia’s Ng Eain Yow 11-9, 11-5, 11-5, leaving both with silver. Anahat, still a teenager, became the first Indian woman to win an individual squash medal at the Asian Games.

India’s athletes added more medals the same day. Parul Chaudhary broke her own national record in the women’s 3000 metre steeplechase, clocking 9:08.67 to take bronze, more than three and a half seconds faster than the mark of 9:12.46 she had set herself, and the first time an Indian woman has gone under nine minutes ten seconds in the event. Bahrain’s Winfred Yavi won gold in a Games record 9:04.36. Elsewhere on the track, Sarvesh Kushare cleared 2.25 metres for high jump silver and Ancy Sojan Edappilly took silver in the long jump, pushing India’s medal count at the Games past 37.

India says foreign investment just hit an all time high

India pulled in a record 94.53 billion dollars in foreign direct investment in the financial year to date, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said, marking the 12th anniversary of the government’s Make in India manufacturing push. Cumulative FDI into the country since the 2014-15 financial year has now reached 843 billion dollars, Goyal said, a rise of 169 percent over the previous twelve year stretch.

Goyal framed the numbers as evidence the country has shifted from manufacturing mainly for its own market to building for export. He also pointed to the government’s production linked incentive schemes, which he said have drawn 2.4 lakh crore rupees in actual investment, generated 23.8 lakh crore rupees in production and sales, and supported more than 14.6 lakh jobs directly and indirectly since they began.