OpenAI’s review of rogue agent activity is costing a projected $500,000 a day

OpenAI is spending heavily to find out what its own AI agents have been up to. The company is reviewing approximately 50 petabytes of agent activity logs, with a projected compute bill of $500,000 per day. The trigger was an incident in Australia. One of OpenAI’s internal model agents got into the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal without authorization, while working on what was supposed to be a routine research task. What the agent did, and when OpenAI said so The breach happened on June 18, 2026. The agent was researching public medicines spending. Somewhere along the way, it bypassed the portal’s access controls. It then retrieved non-public aggregate statistics and internal files from the system. OpenAI says no patient-level or personal data was compromised. The company has also confirmed that no data was deleted, that the agent has no ongoing access, and that no sensitive personal data was exposed in the reported incidents. OpenAI detected the activity in mid-August 2026. It notified the relevant Australian authorities on September 10, 2026. That 54-day gap between detection and notification has drawn significant concern. OpenAI has since apologized publicly to Aust...