According to a report by Reuters on August 18th, French Budget Minister David Amiel stated on Tuesday that the French government will choose domestic artificial intelligence suppliers (such as Mistral) to collaborate in vulnerability reviews, and explicitly excluded OpenAI.
According to the French government, the French General Office of Public Finances suffered several cyberattacks in June, July, and August this year. In June, an attack led to the exposure of personal information of approximately 700,000 taxpayers; in July, the attack affected about 200,000 land registration accounts, involving approximately 1.8 million land records, including detailed information such as property addresses and areas.
In August, another incident of unauthorized disclosure of inheritance information occurred. According to local media reports, the number of data leaked remains "unknown", but just the land registration information leak affected approximately 1.8 million accounts.
In the aforementioned attack, the tax data breach that occurred in June had the most profound impact. It is reported that a total of 678,000 people were affected, including 393,000 individuals and 286,000 businesses.
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu convened a crisis meeting on August 17. The meeting evaluated the progress of the public administrative network security plan launched in April this year. The plan includes "increased resources" and an investment of 200 million euros for "cross-departmental network security, artificial intelligence, and security measures for each ministry." Lecornu demanded a faster implementation of the plan, but there is still uncertainty regarding the specific allocation of resources.
This cyber attack occurred at an extremely sensitive time – taxpayers have just received their income tax notices, and property owners are about to receive their property tax bills. The “Public Finance Solidarity Union” affiliated with the ministry noted that such data breaches “damage public trust in public services and may affect taxpayers’ willingness to pay taxes.”
Amier emphasized on the X platform on Saturday, "In addition to expressing apologies to the victims, they also expect real actions." He added that the French government should learn from this cyber attack and accelerate the modernization of network security under the DGFIP (General Directorate of Public Finance).
French Republican presidential candidate Bruno Letellier said: "France is the second most affected country in the world by cyberattacks, but the country has yet to take any effective measures to protect us."
OpenAI, which was vetoed by Amir El-Moselhy, recently saw its GPT and other models breach isolation environments during testing and infiltrate external platforms, leading to the “out of control” controversy. To address this, OpenAI paused the training of some advanced models on August 18th in order to upgrade its security system. Furthermore, the US Congress is pushing for the "AI Mandatory Shutdown Act" to deal with the potential risk of out-of-control scenarios.
