The two companies are collaborating to help businesses identify and validate software vulnerabilities using OpenAI's AI capabilities
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IBM $IBM on Monday disclosed its entry into the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, unveiling an application security service that draws on OpenAI's AI capabilities to give enterprises a faster, more precise way to surface and confirm software vulnerabilities.
Rather than relying on traditional code scanning alone, the service applies AI-driven analysis to application code, surfacing the areas most likely to harbor flaws and exploitable paths, the company said. It is built on IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM's AI platform for delivering consulting services, which connects client application environments to advanced AI in a controlled and governed way — operating with read-only access to code repositories, the company said. Clients can start with focused evaluations of specific applications and expand to continuous monitoring as their code changes over time.
Underpinning the offering is Project Lightwell, IBM and Red Hat's $5 billion initiative to secure open-source software across the enterprise software supply chain, which mobilizes engineers alongside AI tools to patch, validate, and manage open-source code. OpenAI's AI capabilities will feed into that effort as well, working in concert with other models to support code review and remediation, the company said.
"Attackers are already using AI to probe, exploit, and scale threats at machine speed. Defenders need the same advantage, with the security and control enterprises require," Mark Hughes, global managing partner of cybersecurity services at IBM Consulting, said in a statement. "The OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program expands our access to a broader set of advanced AI capabilities, which we deploy within our clients' environments to help surface the most relevant risks faster and help them act with confidence."
Dane Stuckey, chief information security officer at OpenAI, said in a statement that the program is designed to help enterprises, governments, and other organizations identify risks, strengthen resilience, and deploy AI with the controls and compliance their environments require.
IBM and OpenAI are among several companies competing to establish a foothold in AI-powered defensive security. OpenAI has separately expanded its Trusted Access for Cyber program and released GPT-5.4-Cyber, a variant of its GPT-5.4 model trained to be more permissive for legitimate security tasks, including binary reverse engineering. Anthropic has pursued similar ground through Project Glasswing, which set aside up to $100 million in usage credits for its Mythos model.
The new IBM application security service is available now, with further integrations planned as part of the Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, the company said.
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