OpenAI pledges $1 billion to strengthen cyber defense against rising AI-enabled cyberattacks

OpenAI commits $1B in AI credits to frontline cyber defenders

OpenAI has pledged $1 billion in credits to subsidize access to its services and training for resource-strapped cyber defenders around the world. The AI giant expects organizations to use the subsidized credits over the next six months as part of its Daybreak for Frontline Defenders initiative, announced Thursday. Critical infrastructure organizations, community banks, nonprofits, and open-source maintainers can apply for access credits online. These are the defenders tasked with securing critical services that people rely on every day, but don't have the budgets or staff to use advanced models and agentic technology to harden their cybersecurity. This makes water systems, electrical utilities, and hospitals attractive targets for ransomware operators looking to halt operations and force extortion payments, as well as government-backed cyber operatives set on disrupting critical services and causing mass chaos. Many national security and cybersecurity experts say these disruptions will likely become more severe as attackers increasingly use autonomous agents and other AI tools to carry out their attempted intrusions. "I've spent a lot of time over the past couple weeks talking to CISOs, and I think that we're at a place where the median response is that we might be heading to a world where critical infrastructure outages are just a way of life," OpenAI president Greg Brockman said during a live event on Thursday. "Water in your city being out for a week, it just kind of happens, and that's quite scary. We have to act, and that's one of the reasons we're really putting our money where our mouth is." The new initiative also comes as OpenAI faces scrutiny over its models' safety after admitting that two of them went rogue, spawned a swarm of agents that interpreted their instructions as allowing them to break out of sandboxes, and hacked Hugging Face earlier this summer. Tatyana Bolton, cybersecurity lead at public affairs firm Monument Advocacy, said it's "excellent" to see OpenAI commit resources to operational tech - not just IT. "AI in (operational technology) OT is inevitable, so operators must get prepared now," Bolton told The Register. "Initiatives like this help OT personnel get familiar with AI tools, learn how to operationalize them safely, and develop proactive defense strategies before threats escalate." But she added, software credits alone will not solve the underlying challenges. "OT environments suffer from legacy technology limitations, a shortage of engineering resources, and severe risk-aversion toward automated changes or rapid patching," Bolton said. "To put this in context, OpenAI's single pledge is more than 20 times larger than a $50 million federal (State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program) SLCGP infrastructure allocation, and over 85 times larger than the (United States Environmental Protection Agency's) EPA's most recent $11.75 million dedicated cybersecurity and resilience grant pool for midsize and large water utilities." MS-ISAC pilot focused on water In addition to doling out model credits, Brockman said OpenAI will also increase its training and hands-on support for defenders in essential sectors. This week, the company held a meeting with utility companies from more than 40 states that collectively provide services to more than half of the people who live in the US. Also as part of the new initiative, OpenAI is launching a pilot program with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) to train and support state, local, tribal, and territorial cyber defenders, beginning with public-sector and water-system defenders. "The pilot will pair Daybreak access with guided training and hands-on assistance for an initial group of public sector and water system defenders, helping them validate and prioritize findings, coordinate remediation, and develop a repeatable approach that can be expanded over time," according to a Thursday OpenAI blog. Just in time for Astra's debut All of this civic-minded work comes as OpenAI debuts its latest Astra model, which researcher Eric Wallace called "world's most capable model for cybersecurity" during the Thursday event. Wallace leads OpenAI's efforts on training and evaluating models' cybersecurity capabilities. Earlier in the week, OpenAI said Astra reached its "critical" cybersecurity capability threshold. This means the new model is so good at finding and exploiting zero-day bugs that it poses a significant risk to critical systems, both from malicious users and even from the model itself, which is capable of carrying out harmful cyber actions "if misaligned." Because of this, OpenAI released Astra with a restricted level of cybersecurity capabilities that Wallace said the company will enforce through various safeguards. "We have things like system level mitigations that block certain prompts from going through," he explained. "We have things like model level refusals that prevent certain types of tasks." This also means participants in OpenAI's Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red programs won't have access to Astra on day one. Daybreak Blue is a restricted access tier for select partners who are allowed to use GPT-5.6 Sol for defensive cybersecurity workflows. Daybreak Red requires additional layers of approval and uses GPT-5.6 Cyber for authorized offensive security actions such as proof-of-concept exploit development, exploit-chain validation, penetration testing, and red teaming. The AI giant is working to make Astra available to both programs' participants "at a later date," Wallace said.®

OpenAI unveils plan to protect critical services from AI cyberattacks

Why it matters: Critical infrastructure organizations -- which have long lacked the budget, manpower and time needed to shore up their cyber defenses -- have been struggling to prepare for the anticipated wave of AI-enabled cyberattacks. Driving the news: OpenAI president Greg Brockman announced the new program while hosting 300 security leaders for a summit at the company's headquarters Thursday. * Axios first reported on the summit and Brockman's anticipated announcement. Zoom in: OpenAI is committing $1 billion to a new Daybreak for Frontline Defenders initiative focused on protecting essential services around the world. * The $1 billion will come in the form of expanded subsidized access to models, training, technical support and partnerships for participating organizations. * OpenAI is also launching Daybreak for America program, which will provide access to its models to local governments, water systems, electricity providers, regional banks and other critical infrastructure. * As part of Daybreak for America, OpenAI is starting a pilot program with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center to train cyber defenders at state and local governments on using their models. * OpenAI is also working with more than 35 technology and cybersecurity services to embed the AI lab's advanced models into their tools, services and workflows. Threat level: For years, cyber officials have feared that AI models will soon be capable of autonomously discovering and chaining together vulnerabilities in complex systems that power public utilities and services. * While frontier labs like OpenAI have largely restricted access to the advanced cyber capabilities of their most powerful models, rapid improvements in open-weight models' capabilities are raising fears that AI-enabled attacks will be here sooner than anticipated. * OpenAI says the new program will allow lesser-resourced utilities to review legacy code, analyze suspicious activity, identify and validate vulnerabilities, prioritize the most serious risks and develop and test security patches. Reality check: Expanding services and training doesn't solve all of the security problems that have plagued critical infrastructure for decades -- which AI-enabled tools will likely now exacerbate. * Many entities also need more workers who understand the nuances of protecting the physical systems they're trying to defend from digital threats.

OpenAI: OpenAI commits $1 billion to cyberdefense effort amid AI safety scrutiny

OpenAI on Thursday, alongside the cybersecurity initiative, also unveiled Astra, a new AI model it described as its most capable yet but said can ⁠at times attempt to evade human monitoring. OpenAI said on Thursday it would commit $1 billion in subsidized access to its AI cybersecurity tools, training and technical support for organizations that protect critical services, as concerns grow over increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled cyberattacks. * OpenAI has faced increased scrutiny since its own AI agent breached systems at ⁠open-source ⁠platform Hugging Face during a July test and attempted to hide its actions. Similar concerns have emerged at rival Anthropic. Both firms are preparing for mega IPOs. * OpenAI on Thursday, alongside the cybersecurity initiative, also unveiled Astra, a new AI model it described as its most capable yet but said can ⁠at times attempt to evade human monitoring. * The initiative, called "Daybreak for Frontline Defenders," will initially focus on U.S. operators ⁠of essential services including water utilities, electric grid operators, state and local governments, community banks and nonprofits, with plans to expand to partner countries in coming weeks, the company said. * This comes as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon last week joined more than 100 companies in warning that time is running short to strengthen cyber defenses before AI-driven attacks become more widespread. * "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as ⁠models around the world become increasingly capable," OpenAI said on Thursday. * "Our goal is to use frontier AI to make the systems Americans depend on harder to attack and easier to repair," the company added.

OpenAI commits $1 billion to cyberdefense effort amid growing AI safety scrutiny

OpenAI said on Thursday it would commit $1 billion in subsidized access to its AI cybersecurity tools, training and technical support for organizations that protect critical services, as concerns grow over increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled cyberattacks. OpenAI has faced increased scrutiny since its own AI agent breached systems at open-source platform Hugging Face during a July test and attempted to hide its actions. Similar concerns have emerged at rival Anthropic. Both firms are preparing for mega IPOs. OpenAI on Thursday, alongside the cybersecurity initiative, also unveiled Astra, a new AI model it described as its most capable yet but said can at times attempt to evade human monitoring. The initiative, called "Daybreak for Frontline Defenders," will initially focus on US operators of essential services including water utilities, electric grid operators, state and local governments, community banks and nonprofits, with plans to expand to partner countries in coming weeks, the company said. This comes as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon last week joined more than 100 companies in warning that time is running short to strengthen cyber defenses before AI-driven attacks become more widespread. AI-enabled cyberattacks becoming more widespread, sophisticated "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyberattacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable," OpenAI said on Thursday. "Our goal is to use frontier AI to make the systems Americans depend on harder to attack and easier to repair," the company added. OpenAI said in August it is slowing down the pace of its AI model development while it overhauls its research and training systems.