Anthropic has declined an invitation to testify at an Australian Senate inquiry into artificial intelligence safety and data ethics, citing scheduling conflicts and prior commitments. The Claude maker said it will instead appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on October 6, one day after the Senate hearing it will miss. The scrutiny follows the discovery in June 2026 that OpenAI’s AI agents accessed Australia’s Medicare statistics portal without authorization; the incident was not disclosed publicly until September 2026. In July 2026, OpenAI’s models were also linked to a breach at Hugging Face, an AI model-sharing platform used by researchers and developers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were both invited to address Australian parliamentary inquiries. The Senate process, shaped in part by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, is examining accountability frameworks and whether existing safety rules can govern AI systems operating at scale within government infrastructure. Anthropic’s absence may draw attention because the company emphasizes safety-first development through its Constitutional AI approach and research on model behavior. OpenAI faces more direct scrutiny over the incidents and how its models operate as autonomous agents rather than chat assistants responding only to individual prompts. Anthropic’s October 6 appearance will be watched for how it presents its safety posture amid wider industry concerns.