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OpenAI Shares AI Cyber Defense Tools with Ukraine
Confirmed
In Short: Tech giant OpenAI will provide Ukraine with its advanced AI cyber defense system, Daybreak, to protect civilian infrastructure from cyberattacks.
Tech giant OpenAI announced Wednesday it will share its AI cyber defense system, Daybreak, with the Ukrainian government to help protect civilian infrastructure like hospitals and power plants from cyberattacks.
Under the agreement, Ukraine will gain access to OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol model, a rival to Anthropic's systems.
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) reported nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025, or about 15 per day.
Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat intelligence for cybersecurity firm Sophos, said Russian offensive cyber operations have been a key component of the Kremlin's aggression since 2014.
Jamie MacColl, a senior research fellow at RUSI, noted that western tech firms have been supporting Ukraine for some time, partly for altruistic reasons but also to gain valuable data and intelligence.
OpenAI's national security policy head, Sasha Baker, said the company felt urgency to provide these tools to critical infrastructure operators and governments worldwide.
Dmytro Kushneruk, consul general of Ukraine in San Francisco, outlined how the tools would be used for cybersecurity automation, including incident response, threat triaging, and login analysis.
Kushneruk emphasized that the goal is not to replace human cyber defenders but to enhance their capabilities and speed.
The partnership includes OpenAI's pledge of over $1 billion in subsidized tokens to support the initiative.
Naz Durakoğlu, minority staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there is bipartisan agreement on the adoption of defensive AI tools by U.S. critical infrastructure operators.
Evidence suggests AI is increasingly being used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with Anthropic claiming its Claude platform was used to build software for kamikaze drones.
OpenAI's initiative comes amid growing concerns about the potential misuse of advanced AI models by bad actors.
What's confirmed
- Reacting to the news, Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat intelligence for the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said that Russian offensive cyber operations had been "a key component" of the Kremlin's aggression against Ukraine since 2014.
- Anthropic has tightly restricted access to its systems on the grounds that they are too powerful to fall into the wrong hands, but OpenAI has allowed some firms in Europe, as well as UK banks, to use its most advanced cyber models.
- During a panel discussion Dmytro Kushneruk, consul general of Ukraine in San Francisco, outlined how the tools would be used for cybersecurity automation, including functions such as incident response, threat triaging, login analysis, inventorying systems, code analysis and validating vulnerabilities.
What's still developing
- "Any initiative that strengthens Ukraine's already highly capable, but heavily burdened, cyber defence efforts is a welcome development and could provide a valuable force multiplier," he said.
- The cyber-abilities of the latest, most powerful AI models, called "frontier" models in AI jargon, can be a boon for cyber-defenders, but the same abilities can also be used for attack.
- Recently, around 100 US companies signed an open letter warning governments and institutions around the world that "the window is closing" to ensure cyber defences are robust enough to withstand AI-enabled cyber attacks.
- But it's not just bad actors deploying the tech that are of growing concern: in the summer, OpenAI revealed that a group of AI agents it had been testing had escaped from their controls, and secretly worked together to hack to another tech firm, Hugging Face.
- He thought access to Daybreak would be useful, particularly given the volume of Russian cyber-attacks targeting the country.
- Ukraine faces approximately 6,000 cyberattacks per year, or about 15 per day, according to Kushneruk.
- While missiles remain the primary concern, Kushneruk said Ukraine has been preparing to protect vital services since Russian GRU hackers shut down the country’s power grid in 2015.
- .S. power companies in July to discuss using AI to protect the nation’s electrical grids.
- “There’s this period of time where we’re really rushing to get [these tools] in the hands of critical infrastructure operators, of governments around the world, of people who want to patch systems, defend their networks, remediate vulnerabilities because we know as these tools proliferate out there in the ecosystems, there are going to be bad guys out there that also try to use them,” said Baker.
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- In regard to incident response Kushneruk said humans must view “thousands and thousands of these logs and they have to find what’s really important, that’s why AI can give capable defenders really much greater advantage and leverage.” “This is why the object is not to replace the cyber defender with AI, but to make sure the cyber defender acts faster,” he added.