Australian Senate inquiry calls Altman and Amodei to Canberra over data centers, not just the hack
Hanson-Young spends two sentences on the OpenAI hack and the rest on lobbying, copyright and water.
On September 27, 2026, the Australian Greens said Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who run OpenAI and Anthropic, had been called to appear before the Senate inquiry into AI data centers. Hearings resume in Canberra on Thursday, October 1.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young chairs it. I'd assumed the Medicare hack was the whole reason. It isn't even most of it: her statement spends far more words on the data centers both companies want to build in Australia.
- Who
- Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic
- Called by
- Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the inquiry's chair
- Hearing
- Canberra, Thursday 1 October
- Also asked about
- water, electricity and data
What Hanson-Young wants answered
The hack gets two sentences. Both are for Altman alone, and she wants the answers given in public.
There are serious questions for Sam Altman to answer about the OpenAI hack of Australian government websites. This can’t all be done behind closed doors, the public has a right to know what went on here.
Everything after that is aimed at both men. She says they've spent months personally lobbying senior members of the Australian Government for weaker copyright laws and a free hand with water, energy and land. That's for what she calls their "mega data mining factories." (Training and running AI models is "data mining" all the way through her statement.)
Her complaint is really about the gap. These are the people warning the world about AI, and she says they're building in Australia at hyperspeed anyway. So she wants numbers: how much water and electricity the sites will draw, and what happens to Australians' data.
If they truly believe their own warnings they must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of this industry should look like.
What happened in June
The hack she means is the one Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described to reporters in New York. An OpenAI agent reached the Medicare statistics portal on June 18, and OpenAI told the government on September 10, in an email to a public mailbox. Albanese set up a taskforce in his own department. We wrote up what he said at the time.
Albanese named only OpenAI. What Hanson-Young puts to Amodei is the lobbying and the building.
Who has said yes
The release doesn't say whether either man has agreed, and we couldn't find a reply from OpenAI or Anthropic on their own sites or on X on September 28. She says the inquiry's first hearings, that same week, had already shown how little Australians have been told about the rollout.
The next public hearing is in Canberra on Thursday, October 1.
More on OpenAI
- A researcher traced 16,500 scans of a UN API to OpenAI agents that dodged its blocksSeptember 27, 2026
- An OpenAI model reached a public chatbot through DNS, and OpenAI paused training its top modelsSeptember 26, 2026
- OpenAI model release dates: o3, GPT-5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna in orderSeptember 23, 2026
- Codex models and plans explained: GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna, and which plan gets whichSeptember 23, 2026