OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs called to appear at Australian AI probe

Australia's Senate inquiry, chaired by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, has called Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to appear, which is the parliamentary equivalent of inviting the fox round to explain the chicken situation. The wording is a small masterpiece: there are 'serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites.' Dario Amodei gets to come along as the chaperone, the one who brings a safety framework to a session whose entertainment is a breached Medicare system. Note what the sentence doesn't promise: any answers.

The chronology is where it gets genuinely funny, in the way a tyre fire is funny. The breach happened in June. The Prime Minister told the country on September 24, calling it 'unacceptable' and saying he had voiced 'extreme concern' to Altman — which, translated out of diplomatic, means he said words in a tone. 'Extreme concern' is the phrase you deploy when you want a headline to exist without the inconvenience of a consequence. Months elapsed between the incident and the confession, and the sharpest adjective to leave the Prime Minister's office was 'unacceptable' — a word you'd otherwise use about a hotel breakfast.

The remedy, meanwhile, is a sentence with two hedges and a calendar in it: the incident 'may' prompt Canberra to 'toughen' the AI-specific laws it is 'readying' for 2027. Two maybes and a three-year delivery window, which in frontier-capability terms is several model generations away — comfortably enough time for the next Medicare. The state-level rule-writing we admired back in Illinois has now gone intercontinental, which is lovely for the map and useless for the breach. Altman and Amodei will appear in Canberra, or they'll send lawyers who emit 'disappointment,' and the committee will publish a report recommending that everyone keep having feelings about it.