SentinelOne says reverse engineering a sophisticated piece of malware, which can take a top security researcher four to six weeks, can now be completed in roughly eight hours with OpenAI Daybreak. Gregor Stewart, SentinelOne‘s Chief AI Officer, describes the output as human-level, and the speedup lets researchers examine more malware samples and connect findings across them. The wider view, he says, can reveal relationships between threats that isolated investigations would miss, calling it “a kind of intelligence that we were never able to afford before.”

Daybreak gives defenders access to OpenAI models for cybersecurity work, and SentinelOne is using it to reverse engineer malware and understand how software behaves. Faster analysis increases capacity to investigate additional samples, but Stewart stresses that accountability remains with people. “The only thing that can’t be automated is accountability,” he says, adding that architectural decisions still need human oversight, while point fixes that do not fundamentally change how software works may be better suited for automation.

Historically, deep investigation at SentinelOne was reserved for the most interesting or important threats, so only small numbers of software samples were reversed. Faster reverse engineering lets the team map a much larger part of the malware landscape and keep pace with how it changes. Comparing more samples can surface shared components in seemingly unrelated threats, giving researchers leads in customer investigations. Stewart says seeing broader relationships between threats would help defenders “defend further out, and be more proactive about your defense.”

Within SentinelOne, access to OpenAI’s cyber capabilities is expanding who can take on security work. Stewart says almost everyone now has access to expertise that was in short supply until a few months ago, so more team members can investigate issues themselves instead of relying on a small group of specialists. He also wants to bring these capabilities into code creation so developers can address security issues while building, saying OpenAI is shifting the advantage to defenders by providing expert-level cyber capability to everyone on the development team.