OpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents as enterprise deployment accelerates

OpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents

OpenAI announced Monday it has acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 to protect LLMs from online adversaries. The frontier lab said in a blog post that once the deal closes, Promptfoo's technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise platform for AI agents. The development of independent AI agents that perform digital tasks has generated excitement about productivity gains. But it's also given bad actors fresh opportunities to access sensitive data or manipulate automated systems. This deal underscores how frontier labs are scrambling to prove their technology can be used safely in critical business operations. Promptfoo was founded by Ian Webster and Michael D'Angelo to develop tools that companies can use to test security vulnerabilities in LLMs, including an open-source interface and library. The company reports that its products are used by more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies. Promptfoo has raised just $23 million since its founding, and was valued at $86 million after its most recent round in July 2025, according to Pitchbook. OpenAI did not disclose the value of the transaction. OpenAI's post said Promptfoo's technology will allow its agent platform to perform automated red-teaming, evaluate agentic workflows for security concerns, and monitor activities for risks and compliance needs. The company also said it expects to continue building out Promptfoo's open-source offering.

OpenAI Buying AI Security Startup Promptfoo to Safeguard AI Agents

OpenAI has agreed to buy Promptfoo, a startup that enables large businesses to find and fix security issues in artificial intelligence models during their development, part of a push to help corporate customers reduce possible risks from deploying AI software. The ChatGPT maker is set to announce Monday that it will integrate Promptfoo's technology into OpenAI Frontier, a recently launched platform that allows organizations to build and manage AI agents. Frontier is meant to help ensure each agent -- which OpenAI refers to as "AI coworkers" -- has appropriate guardrails and data access. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed. OpenAI and its rivals are racing to develop more advanced AI agents that can field complex tasks on a user's behalf, with limited need for human intervention. At the same time, the AI developer is working to convince a broader mix of businesses to pay for the technology by ensuring these products are efficient and safe. "OpenAI acquiring Promptfoo signals a clear commitment to making enterprise AI not just powerful, but safe and reliable at scale," said Ganesh Bell, managing director at Insight Partners, which led an $18.4 million funding round in the security startup last year. Two-year-old Promptfoo makes open-source tools for testing the security of AI systems as well as for helping companies try to attack their own products in order to find vulnerabilities, a process known as red-teaming. The San Francisco-based startup counts roughly a quarter of Fortune 500 firms as customers. Promptfoo is one of a host of startups working to develop cybersecurity products that use AI to guard against hackers even as bad actors turn to similar technology to probe for ways into critical networks. OpenAI, too, has moved to imbue its AI products and agents with security features. Last week, the company introduced an AI agent meant to help security teams find and patch vulnerabilities in large databases, similar to a tool from rival Anthropic PBC. As part of the new acquisition, OpenAI's Frontier will get automated security testing and red-teaming features. The product will also get capabilities to help organizations monitor changes and track testing in order to keep up with risk and compliance needs. OpenAI said it will keep building out Promptfoo's open-source work while adding the latter's technology to Frontier.

OpenAI to buy cybersecurity startup Promptfoo to better safeguard AI agents

The Sam Altman-led firm did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said Promptfoo's team would join OpenAI. Promptfoo's security tools will be brought within OpenAI's Frontier platform for AI agents. "As AI agents become more connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them is more challenging and important than ever," Promptfoo CEO Ian Webster said in a statement. "Joining OpenAI lets us accelerate this work, bringing stronger security, safety, and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems." OpenAI said that it would also continue building Promptfoo's popular open-source project that lets developers test various AI-related prompts and agents and compare the performance of large language models like GPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. Promptfoo announced in July that it had raised a Series A financing round of $18.4 million, which was led by Insight Partners and also included Andreessen Horowitz. The startup has 11 employees and has raised a total of $22.68 million with a post-valuation of $85.50 million as of July 2025, according to the deal-tracking service Pitchbook. Andreessen Horowitz has been pushing into the infrastructure and defense markets, and most recently said in January that it raised $15 billion as part of its funding efforts related to "American Dynamism." From that raise, the venture capital firm said that $6.75 billion will be allocated for a growth fund while two other $1.7 billion funds will focus on apps and infrastructure, respectively.

The open-source AI red-teaming tool used by Fortune 500 companies is now part of OpenAI

The acquisition of Promptfoo, which counts more than 125,000 developers and 30-plus Fortune 500 companies among its users, is OpenAI's most direct move yet into AI application security. Its technology will go into Frontier, the company's enterprise agent platform launched just a month ago. When Ian Webster was leading the LLM engineering team at Discord, shipping AI products to 200 million users, he noticed something the security industry had not yet caught up with: the tools his team relied on to keep those products safe were built for a different era. Traditional vulnerability scanners could not reason about prompt injection. Static analysis had nothing to say about a model that promised a user something it had no authority to deliver. The testing infrastructure for AI applications, he concluded, simply did not exist. So he built it himself, nights and weekends, as an open-source project. That project became Promptfoo. On Monday, OpenAI announced it is acquiring the company. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, will see Promptfoo's technology integrated into OpenAI Frontier, the enterprise agent management platform that OpenAI launched in early February. In a post on X, OpenAI said the acquisition would "strengthen agentic security testing and evaluation capabilities" within Frontier, and pledged that Promptfoo would remain open source under its current licence, with continued support for existing customers. Promptfoo, which Webster co-founded with Michael D'Angelo - a former VP of engineering and head of AI at identity verification firm Smile Identity - launched commercially in 2024 with $5 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The seed round attracted backing from a notable roster of angels, including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest. By July 2025, the company had raised an $18.4 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with a16z again participating. Total funding ahead of the acquisition was approximately $23.4 million. At the time of the Series A, Promptfoo said it had more than 125,000 developers using its open-source framework and over 30 Fortune 500 companies running its enterprise platform in production. Customers span retail, telecoms, financial services, and media, sectors with acute exposure to the regulatory and reputational risks of AI failures. The product works by acting as an automated adversary. Rather than relying on manual penetration testing, Promptfoo's platform talks directly to a customer's AI application, through its chat interface or APIs, using specialised models and agents that behave like users, or specifically like attackers. When an attack succeeds, the platform records it, analyses why it worked, and iterates through an agentic reasoning loop to refine the test and expose deeper vulnerabilities. Risks the platform targets include prompt injection, data leakage, jailbreaks, and what Webster has called "application-level" failures: AI systems that promise users things they cannot deliver, or that reveal database contents to a customer service query, or that stray into political opinion in a homework tutor. It is precisely those application-level risks that make Promptfoo's acquisition a strategic fit for OpenAI's current direction. Frontier, which OpenAI has described as an attempt to create "AI coworkers" for the enterprise, is designed to give AI agents access to production systems, CRM platforms, data warehouses, internal ticketing tools, and to execute workflows with real-world consequences. Agents operating at that level of access create a correspondingly enlarged attack surface. Early customers named by OpenAI for Frontier include Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Thermo Fisher Scientific: organisations for whom a misbehaving agent is not an inconvenience but a liability. OpenAI has been building out Frontier at speed. Since launching the platform on 5 February, the company has announced Frontier Alliances with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey, enlisting the consulting firms to drive enterprise deployment. Separately, the company has been rolling out Codex Security, an AI-powered application security agent for software repositories, formerly known internally as Aardvark, which entered wider availability on the same day as the Promptfoo acquisition announcement. Promptfoo is not the only AI security product entering broader availability this month. Anthropic launched Claude Code Security in February, targeting similar vulnerability scanning use cases. The convergence suggests that as AI agents move into production at scale, the question of who secures them, and how, is fast becoming one of the defining commercial battlegrounds in enterprise AI. For Promptfoo's open-source community, OpenAI's commitment to keeping the project open source under its current licence will be the line to watch. The project has over 248 contributors, and its adoption by developers at companies across the AI industry - including, according to Promptfoo's own website, teams at Anthropic and Google - was built on the premise that the tool belonged to the developer community rather than to any one vendor. That promise now sits alongside a commercial integration into one of the most powerful enterprise AI platforms in the market.

OpenAI to acquire Promptfoo to expand AI application testing capabilities - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI to acquire Promptfoo to expand AI application testing capabilities OpenAI Group PBC announced today that it had entered an agreement to acquire testing and security evaluation platform for artificial intelligence applications startup Promptfoo Inc. for an undisclosed price. Founded in 2024, Promptfoo began as an open-source framework for evaluating AI prompts and model behavior before expanding into a commercial platform used by developers and enterprise security teams to evaluate and test applications built on large language models and other generative AI systems. The company's platform addresses risks associated with deploying AI models in production environments, including prompt injection, data leakage, jailbreak attacks and unsafe tool execution. It does so through an underlying architecture that allows developers and security teams to systematically evaluate how AI systems respond to structured inputs, adversarial prompts and real-world usage scenarios. The technology works through a testing framework that allows teams to define prompts, expected outputs and evaluation criteria in configuration files. The system runs the prompts across one or more language models or AI applications to capture responses and score them against predefined rules or automated grading functions. The framework supports integrations with common development tools and application programming interfaces to allow evaluations to be executed locally, in continuous integration pipelines, or as part of automated deployment workflows. Core functionality includes prompt testing, red-team simulations and evaluation dashboards that document model behavior under different conditions. The system also supports regression testing, allowing organizations to compare outputs across model versions or configuration changes to identify behavioral differences before software updates are released. The platform is currently used in environments where organizations are building or operating AI-powered applications such as chatbots, agent frameworks and automated decision tools. OpenAI plans to integrate Promptfoo's technology directly into OpenAI Frontier, its platform for building and operating AI coworkers. Promptfoo's technology will also be used by OpenAI to allow enterprises to test agent behavior, detect risks before deployment and maintain clear records to support oversight, governance and accountability over time. "Promptfoo brings deep engineering expertise in evaluating, securing and testing AI systems at enterprise scale," said Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, in an announcement post. "Their work helps businesses deploy secure and reliable AI applications and we're excited to bring these capabilities directly into Frontier." Coming into its acquisition, Promptfoo had raised $23.6 million in funding, including a round of $18.4 million in July. Investors in the company include Insight Partners LP and Andreessen Horowitz.

OpenAI Is Acquiring Promptfoo to Build New Enterprise Tools in Frontier

OpenAI Frontier will offer security testing and red teaming tools OpenAI announced its plans to acquire the artificial intelligence (AI) security platform Promptfoo on Monday. The San Francisco-based AI giant said that it was in the process of finalising the deal, which is currently subject to customary closing conditions. The acquisition will allow the ChatGPT maker to integrate Promptfoo's technology stack into OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise-grade platform designed to build, deploy, and manage fleets of AI agents. The company highlighted that the security platform's library will continue to remain open-source under its current licence. OpenAI to Buy Promptfoo In a post, the AI giant announced its latest acquisition target. Promptfoo was founded in 2024 by Ian Webster and Michael D'Angelo in San Francisco. It is known for its open-source framework and command line interface (CLI) tool designed for testing, evaluating, and red teaming large language model (LLM) applications. The open-source tool is currently hosted on GitHub with a permissive MIT licence for academic and commercial usage. "We started Promptfoo because developers needed a practical way to secure AI systems. As AI agents become more connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them is more challenging and important than ever. Joining OpenAI lets us accelerate this work, bringing stronger security, safety, and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems," said Ian Webster, Co-founder and CEO, Promptfoo. Once the acquisition is finalised, OpenAI plans to integrate Promptfoo's tech stack into its Frontier platform. The enterprise-focused platform was launched in February and is a central control centre for autonomous agents. The AI firm says that enterprises deploying AI agents into workflows require systemic ways to test agent behaviour, detect risks before deployment, and maintain clear records, and the new technology will help it develop that on Frontier. Some of the new core capabilities Promptfoo will enable include new security and safety testing tools that help enterprises identify and solve major risks such as prompt injections, jailbreaks, data leaks, tool misuse, and more. OpenAI Frontier will also build evaluation tools that will identify, investigate, and remediate agent risks within the workflows, and offer reporting and traceability to let them keep records of testing, monitor changes over time, and meet governance, risk, and compliance expectations.

OpenAI to buy AI security startup Promptfoo to safeguard AI agents

OpenAI plans to acquire Promptfoo, a startup that helps businesses detect and fix security issues in AI models during development. Its technology will be added to OpenAI Frontier, a platform for managing AI agents. The deal supports safer enterprise deployment, though financial terms were not disclosed. OpenAI has agreed to buy Promptfoo, a startup that enables large businesses to find and fix security issues in artificial intelligence models during their development, part of a push to help corporate customers reduce possible risks from deploying AI software. The ChatGPT maker is set to announce Monday that it will integrate Promptfoo's technology into OpenAI Frontier, a recently launched platform that allows organizations to build and manage AI agents. Frontier is meant to help ensure each agent -- which OpenAI refers to as "AI coworkers" -- has appropriate guardrails and data access. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed. OpenAI and its rivals are racing to develop more advanced AI agents that can field complex tasks on a user's behalf, with limited need for human intervention. At the same time, the AI developer is working to convince a broader mix of businesses to pay for the technology by ensuring these products are efficient and safe. "OpenAI acquiring Promptfoo signals a clear commitment to making enterprise AI not just powerful, but safe and reliable at scale," said Ganesh Bell, managing director at Insight Partners, which led an $18.4 million funding round in the security startup last year. Andreessen Horowitz also participated in the round. Two-year-old Promptfoo makes open-source tools for testing the security of AI systems as well as for helping companies try to attack their own products in order to find vulnerabilities, a process known as red-teaming. The San Francisco-based startup counts roughly a quarter of Fortune 500 firms as customers. Promptfoo is one of a host of startups working to develop cybersecurity products that use AI to guard against hackers even as bad actors turn to similar technology to probe for ways into critical networks. OpenAI, too, has moved to imbue its AI products and agents with security features. Last week, the company introduced an AI agent meant to help security teams find and patch vulnerabilities in large databases, similar to a tool from rival Anthropic PBC. As part of the new acquisition, OpenAI's Frontier will get automated security testing and red-teaming features. The product will also get capabilities to help organizations monitor changes and track testing in order to keep up with risk and compliance needs. OpenAI said it will keep building out Promptfoo's open-source work while adding the latter's technology to Frontier.

OpenAI Bets On AI Agent Security With Promptfoo Acquisition

OpenAI said it would integrate Promptfoo's technology "directly into OpenAI Frontier, OpenAl's platform for building and operating AI coworkers." ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Monday that it had acquired Promptfoo, a company focused on helping developers and enterprises build secure AI applications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a blog post, OpenAI said it would integrate Promptfoo's technology "directly into OpenAI Frontier, OpenAl's platform for building and operating AI coworkers." OpenAI Frontier is OpenAI's enterprise platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents. "As enterprises deploy AI coworkers into real workflows, evaluation, security, and compliance become foundational requirements," the blog post stated. "Enterprises need systematic ways to test agent behavior, detect risks before deployment, and maintain clear records to support oversight, governance, and accountability over time." Promptfoo -- based in San Mateo, California and backed by venture heavyweights Insight Partners and Andreessen Horowitz -- has raised about $22 million in funding and has a valuation of about $119 million, according to PitchBook. The startup was founded by Ian Webster, previously a senior staff software engineer at Discord, and Michael D'Angelo, who was previously VP of engineering at Smile Identity. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, D'Angelo said that "I'm proud of what we've built and how quickly this team built it. We're joining OpenAI to take this work much further. After close, the Promptfoo team will continue building inside OpenAI Frontier, helping make evaluation, red teaming, and security review a built-in part of how teams ship AI agents. Promptfoo remains open source. We'll continue maintaining the project, accepting contributions, supporting multiple providers and models, and serving customers." CRN has reached out to OpenAI for further details but did not hear back by press time. OpenAI said the closing of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.

OpenAI Plans to Acquire Promptfoo to Secure Agentic AI | PYMNTS.com

Upon closing of the acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, OpenAI will integrate Promptfoo's technology into OpenAI Frontier, which is the company's platform for building and operating AI coworkers, OpenAI said in a Monday (March 9) announcement. The Promptfoo platform helps enterprises identify and remediate vulnerabilities in AI systems during development, according to the release. Promptfoo's suite of tools is used by 25% of Fortune 500 companies, per the release. When these tools are integrated into OpenAI Frontier, enterprises building agents on Frontier will be able to use them to identify and remediate risks, do so earlier in the development process, and meet the growing governance, risk and compliance expectations for AI, the release said. "Promptfoo brings deep engineering expertise in evaluating, securing and testing AI systems at enterprise scale," Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, said in the release. "Their work helps businesses deploy secure and reliable AI applications, and we're excited to bring these capabilities directly into Frontier." Promptfoo Co-Founder and CEO Ian Webster said in the release that Promptfoo was started to provide developers with a practical way to secure AI systems. "As AI agents become more connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them is more challenging and more important than ever," Webster said. "Joining OpenAI lets us accelerate this work, bringing stronger security, safety and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems." In Promptfoo's own blog post announcing the deal, Webster and Promptfoo Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Michael D'Angelo wrote that Promptfoo will remain open source and will continue to serve users and customers. "We will continue to maintain the open-source suite as a best-in-class red teaming, static scanning and evals tool for any AI model or application," they wrote. "Promptfoo will continue to support a diverse range of providers and models, reflecting the way real teams build and deploy AI systems." OpenAI launched Frontier in February, saying the platform provides AI coworkers with shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning, and clear permissions and boundaries. The company announced at the same time that it also offers the services of human engineers called OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to help enterprises use these AI agents. Later in February, OpenAI announced that it partnered with four consulting firms to help it deploy the Frontier platform and that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become the exclusive third-party cloud provider for the Frontier program.

Sam Altman's OpenAI Acquires Promptfoo to Fortify AI Agent Security

Promptfoo's Security Tools will be Brought Within OpenAI's Frontier Platform for AI Agents OpenAI has confirmed its acquisition of Promptfoo, a cybersecurity startup specializing in testing and securing AI systems. The deal could strengthen protections for AI agents as the technology becomes more widely deployed across industries. The startup has 11 employees and has raised a total of $22.68 million with a post-valuation of $85.5 million as of July 2025. 'We're excited to welcome the Promptfoo team and continue building the tools enterprises need to deploy secure, reliable AI,' OpenAI said.

OpenAI Acquires Promptfoo to Strengthen AI Agent Security

OpenAI has announced the acquisition of cybersecurity start-up Promptfoo, which specializes in tools for testing and securing artificial intelligence systems. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Promptfoo's team will join OpenAI, and its technology will be integrated into the Frontier platform, dedicated to developing AI agents capable of interacting with real-world systems and data. Promptfoo develops tools that allow companies to test prompts, assess the reliability of AI agents, and compare the performance of different models such as GPT, Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini. According to its chief executive, Ian Webster, the integration is expected to accelerate the rollout of advanced security, governance and validation capabilities for AI applications deployed in production. OpenAI also said it would continue to support Promptfoo's open-source project, widely used by developers. The start-up, which has 11 employees, had raised a total of $22.68m, including $18.4m in a funding round led by Insight Partners in July, at a valuation of about $85.5m, according to PitchBook.

OpenAI to acquire AI security platform Promptfoo: Here's why it matters

With Promptfoo's technology integrated into Frontier, enterprises will be able to run automated security tests directly within the platform. OpenAI has announced plans to acquire Promptfoo, an AI security platform that helps companies test and secure their AI systems during development. The move aims to make AI coworkers safer and more reliable for businesses that are increasingly using them in real-world workflows. Once the acquisition is completed, Promptfoo's technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, a platform for building and managing AI-powered assistants, also known as AI coworkers. As more companies are now using AI agents for real work, ensuring their safety and reliability has become very important. 'As enterprises deploy AI coworkers into real workflows, evaluation, security, and compliance become foundational requirements. Enterprises need systematic ways to test agent behaviour, detect risks before deployment, and maintain clear records to support oversight, governance, and accountability over time,' OpenAI explained in its announcement. Also read: Anthropic sues US defence department, gets support from OpenAI and Google employees With Promptfoo's technology integrated into Frontier, enterprises will be able to run automated security tests directly within the platform. These tests will help detect risks such as prompt injections, jailbreaks, data leaks, tool misuse, and out-of-policy agent behaviours. OpenAI also plans to make security and evaluation a core part of the development workflow. This means companies will be able to identify and fix potential problems while building their AI systems instead of dealing with them after deployment. Also read: Anthropic's Claude finds first Firefox bug in 20 mins during test, Mozilla devs call it serious Another key feature will be improved monitoring and reporting. Organisations will be able to document tests, monitor changes over time, and more. 'We're excited to welcome the Promptfoo team and continue building the tools enterprises need to deploy secure, reliable AI,' OpenAI said.