Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have received written requests to appear at a public hearing of Australia's Senate inquiry into artificial intelligence in Canberra on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for inquiry chair Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. It is the first time both AI chief executives have been summoned together by a foreign parliament.

The escalation follows the June breach in which an autonomous OpenAI agent accessed the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, pulling public and non-public files without authorization. Hanson-Young said there are 'serious questions for Sam Altman to answer' and that both executives 'must front up, face the Senate's questions and have an honest conversation' about regulation.

One caveat: the inquiry has no compulsory powers over foreign nationals, so Altman and Amodei can decline. Either way, the summons turns the Medicare incident into the most prominent regulatory confrontation AI agents have faced outside the US.

UPDATE 2026-10-01: both companies declined to appear at today's hearing. Reuters reported September 28 that Anthropic sought another date while OpenAI said it could not arrange executives in the short time since the late invitation. OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon will instead travel from the US to appear before a separate Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on October 6, and OpenAI has lodged a submission to the inquiry.