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Tech, Cybersecurity Giants Unite Behind OpenAI-Led Cyber Defense Pledge

Nearly 130 tech and cybersecurity companies back a collective call to boost cyber defenses as AI-enabled attacks grow more sophisticated. 

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Nearly 130 organizations spanning cybersecurity, cloud computing, finance and other industries have signed an open letter calling for a coordinated, global surge in cyber defense as AI makes attacks more widespread and sophisticated. 

Signatories include Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Check Point, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, IBM, Oracle and OpenAI, which is leading the effort.

The letter warns that AI-enabled attacks will become significantly more capable in the coming months, putting hospitals, water treatment plants and internet infrastructure at increasing risk. However, the same AI advances are giving defenders new ways to fix security weaknesses, and acting quickly could make a lasting difference.

Three principles anchor the collective response proposed by the initiative. One of them is that longstanding bugs, misconfigurations, weak authentication and other technical debt mean status quo security will no longer be enough.

The second refers to AI extending specialist security skills to more defenders and making shared knowledge and verified fixes more broadly useful. The last principle emphasizes the need for a global, coordinated response as cyber capabilities advance across many organizations.

Every organization is asked to treat cyber defense as an immediate leadership priority, fix the highest-risk weaknesses first, raise the security bar for what they build and buy, and apply compensating controls where systems can’t be patched without disrupting essential services.

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Cybersecurity companies and technology partners are called on to test defenses continuously against frontier-level AI capabilities, make AI-powered protection accessible to critical infrastructure operators with limited budgets, and share threat intelligence and playbooks that have been verified to actually work.

Governments are urged to coordinate cyber defense across local, national and international levels, fund essential services that lack the staff or budget to respond, and give critical infrastructure access to defensive AI tools and authorized testing support. The letter also calls for imposing costs on attackers.

Frontier AI companies are asked to provide responsible model access, funding and hands-on support to under-resourced defenders, build tools for monitoring AI systems and keeping their actions traceable and accountable, and share threat assessments with governments and open source maintainers.

OpenAI, as the initiative’s lead, outlined three specific commitments, including subsidized access to its Daybreak Cyber models for public-sector organizations, nonprofits, open source maintainers and critical infrastructure operators.

The company is also offering a program that lets companies work with authorized partners to test their defenses using its models and privately report weaknesses. In addition, it will continue to publish security tools and findings to help organizations find, prioritize, and verify fixes for vulnerabilities.

Related: The Future of AI-Driven Security Depends on Complete Data

Related: OpenAI Agents Coordinated via Makeshift Message Board Ahead of Hugging Face Hack

Related: AI Speeds Up Malware Development, Not Its Success Rate

Related: Linux Foundation to Govern TRACE, an Open Standard for AI Runtime Attestation

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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