OpenAI is planning its next internal security sprint, bringing new researchers and security partners together with its own teams to use OpenAI’s models to test and strengthen its systems. The company is partnering with Cathedral, whose researchers will use OpenAI’s models alongside OpenAI teams to challenge defenses and bring differentiated expertise to finding weaknesses. OpenAI is also expanding its Security Bug Bounty program, including more than quadrupling rewards for critical findings, and says it wants researchers to challenge assumptions and help strengthen both its systems and the methods it uses to defend them. This is part of an ongoing effort to use AI to continuously find and fix weaknesses in its systems.

OpenAI says the last sprint showed what this approach can deliver: the company dedicated 25% of its product engineers to finding and fixing weaknesses, and used Codex to investigate findings, reproduce vulnerabilities in isolated environments, and prepare patches for review. It is building on that work because traditional cyber defenses alone are no longer sufficient. OpenAI points to recent industry incidents as evidence that threats can emerge quickly and that organizations need continuous defensive loops to find and fix weaknesses before attackers do.

Keeping the defender’s window open, OpenAI argues, requires organizations to use frontier cyber capabilities to harden their systems. OpenAI is using its most capable models to strengthen its own defenses and making them available to Daybreak customers. It has committed $1 billion in subsidized access over six months for frontline defenders protecting essential services and digital infrastructure, and it is sharing the architecture and lessons from the last sprint alongside a blueprint for empowering cyber defenders across industry and government.

OpenAI says it will keep advancing its models, using them to strengthen its systems, and expanding access for trusted defenders. It also acknowledges that keeping the defender’s window open will require action across the industry, and that the work needs to start now.