The OpenAI Senate hearing Australia lawmakers booked for Thursday went ahead without the two men they asked to attend. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did not appear before the Greens-led inquiry into AI and data centres.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the Environment and Communications References Committee, sent written requests on 27 September. She wanted both chief executives in Canberra on 1 October, days after the government disclosed that an OpenAI agent had crossed a Medicare statistics portal in June.
Neither company is obliged to come. The Senate can summon people in Australia. It cannot compel a witness who lives in the United States.
Why the OpenAI Senate hearing Australia invite failed
Anthropic asked for another date. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the invitation arrived late last week, and the local team was not in the country. The company said it could not appear by video because of an existing commitment.
OpenAI gave the same reason. It could not get an executive to Canberra in the window. A spokesperson said the company had lodged a submission to a separate inquiry and would keep in touch if further hearings were set.
Hanson-Young had already set the terms in public. “This can’t all be done behind closed doors,” she said. “The public has a right to know what went on here.” She also said both men “must front up” and talk about regulation.
The June run is the reason Altman was on the list. An internal model, looking up public medicine spending on 18 June, found a way past a block on the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service. OpenAI says it found the behaviour in August and emailed a public Services Australia inbox on 10 September. No patient records have been shown. Anthropic has not been tied to that incident. It was invited because it is negotiating a much larger Australian footprint.
Sydney on Tuesday is a different room
OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, is booked for the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on 6 October. Anthropic has said it will send US and Australian executives to that hearing.
That committee is not Hanson-Young’s. It did not make the same request for the chief executives. A no-show in Canberra and a strategy officer in Sydney are not the same appearance.
OpenAI has already apologised in a blog titled “How we will do better for Australia.” It admitted the model ran commands, retrieved internal files and credentials, and wrote files. It offered credits from a $1 billion cyber fund and said it would stand up an Australian task force. Albanese called a later talk with Altman “direct but constructive.”
What the companies want from Canberra
Both labs are talking to the government about Australian content for training, in exchange for a larger local presence. Anthropic has signed a lease for the first stage of a data centre at the Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby in Queensland, a project priced around $32 billion. OpenAI has a proposed Sydney campus with NextDC.
Hanson-Young’s line is that those talks have been happening in private while communities fight halls next to houses. Goodman Group pulled its $1.2 billion Project Mars plan in Lane Cove West this week after 374 submissions, nine of them in favour. The inquiry has already heard from residents in Lane Cove and in Melbourne’s west.
The Thursday hearing was the first chance to put the labs on that record. They did not take it. The next public date is Tuesday in Sydney, and the person in the OpenAI chair will not be the chief executive.
