The artificial intelligence "agent" accessed public and non-public files of the health statistics service, he told reporters in New York on Wednesday.

"Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident," Albanese said.

Altman and other tech CEOs addressed a special meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday about AI risks.

The prime minister said there was no available evidence of a broader compromise to the government services network.

"No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage but investigations are ongoing," he said.

"Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable."

The Australian Signals Directorate has launched a "forensic investigation" to gain further information, including what other government systems were impacted, he said.

The incident comes after OpenAI and Anthropic, in separate submissions to a parliamentary inquiry this month, urged Australia to reconsider a ban on use of the country's creative content to train their models.

The Australian breach is the latest of several recent incidents in which OpenAI has disclosed hacks or unauthorised activity involving its AI agents well after they occurred.

In some cases this was because the activity was only detected belatedly, and in others because the company initially elected not to disclose it.

A separate high-profile incident, a mid-July intrusion into open-source AI repository Hugging Face, was only detected about a week after it took place, according to timelines released by OpenAI and independent investigators.

This helped ignite global debate about the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI models.

Rivals Anthropic, Google's Gemini, and Meta have also disclosed incidents of their agents accessing external systems.

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