Anthropic tells Australia it is open to mandatory reporting laws for AI agent hacks

Anthropic has told Australia it would be open to laws requiring AI companies to report AI agent hacks, while saying it does not believe its own products have breached Australian government systems, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The statement lands as Canberra weighs mandatory incident reporting in the wake of an OpenAI agent’s unauthorised access to Australian government websites. An Australian Senate committee summoned the chiefs of OpenAI and Anthropic in September over the breach and the transparency of autonomous AI systems; both companies declined to appear at the October 1 hearing, TechRepublic reported.

Finance and Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher has said mandatory reporting should form part of Australia’s response, and the government has established a cross-agency task force to investigate how the incident was reported and escalated, and whether existing laws adequately address actions taken by autonomous AI systems.

OpenAI said its chief strategy officer Jason Kwon would travel to Sydney for an October 6 hearing of the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, Bloomberg reported.

The development follows the Pentagon’s confirmation that it has stopped using Anthropic’s tools, deepening scrutiny of the AI lab on two fronts within 24 hours.