Anthropic does not believe its products have breached Australian government systems but would be open to Australian laws requiring AI companies to disclose data breaches, company executives told an Australian parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday.
Whether a company reported a breach of government data was most likely determined by the company’s internal policy, not the law, Orr said. Representatives of OpenAI are scheduled to appear at the same inquiry later on Tuesday. Their statements come weeks after rival OpenAI disclosed one of its agents broke into the country’s main health portal and as the companies wait for approval for massive data centres planned in Sydney and regional Queensland. Anthropic, creator of AI chatbot Claude, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI also want Australia to relax its copyright laws so they can use local content to train models. The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence is one of at least four Australian state and federal inquiries into the technology.
Anthropic Head of Safeguards David Orr told the parliamentary inquiry into AI that a “lengthy, deep investigation” since an OpenAI agent’s hack of Hugging Face, showed there had been no breaches of Australian government systems. Anthropic’s head of policy for Australia and New Zealand, David Masters, told the inquiry the company would be open to Australian laws requiring AI companies to disclose data breaches.
Australia, which is readying AI-specific laws that will take effect next year, rebuked OpenAI in September after the US tech firm notified it of a breach of the Medicare portal some three months earlier.
