Are we back in big tech's 'move fast and break things' era?

It was a mantra coined by the tech giant Meta and used until 2012, which came to define the bad old days of social media running riot in a feeding frenzy of user data.

Yet now we have large companies scrambling to develop ever more powerful AI, in an intense global race to be first to build the world's most advanced models, egged on by US President Donald Trump.

Despite numerous pledges, commitments and open letters over the years from the industry, promising to prioritise safe, responsible AI aligned with human values, examples of bots behaving badly – to put it mildly - are now coming at us thick and fast.

OpenAI's agents seem to feature quite prominently in the current roll call of AI products taking their remits to extremes.

The Australian government is fuming at the firm's most recent disclosure, that its products accessed both public and non-public data from part of the country's online Medicare healthcare system.

It happened in June, but OpenAI didn't notice until August. It notified the authorities in September.

As Camilla Chan, founder of the cyber-security firm X-Phy, puts it: "The future of autonomous AI cannot rest on companies discovering their own failures and reporting it afterwards."

Worse still, the agents were reportedly able to plot the attack using a German web forum they secretly took over in June, according to ABC's Cam Wilson , external .