OpenAI Gives Ukraine Access to Daybreak AI Cyber-Defense Tool

OpenAI is giving Ukraine’s government access to Daybreak, an AI tool built to hunt down software vulnerabilities—the hidden coding flaws hackers exploit to break into a system—before Russian hackers find them first.

The offer went to Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and was announced Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine’s Consul General in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, OpenAI’s Head of National Security Policy, made the announcement together.

Daybreak runs on GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI’s flagship large language model—the same kind of AI that powers ChatGPT, trained on huge volumes of text and code so it can read software the way a human expert would. It scans aging systems for weak points, checks whether a suspected flaw is actually exploitable, and confirms a patch actually closes the hole before anyone ships it.

“We are proud to support Ukraine’s cyber defenders, who are protecting essential services against attacks every day,” Sasha Baker, Head of National Security Policy at OpenAI said. “Ukraine is already on the front line, and its defenders need support now.”

Ukraine is not the first wartime-adjacent government OpenAI has courted. The company already gives cyber agencies in France, Germany, and Poland access to its models—CERT Polska used the tool to catch six vulnerabilities in commercial router software, all since patched by the vendor.

The timing lines up. On September 3, OpenAI pledged $1 billion in subsidized Daybreak access to resource-strapped defenders worldwide and said it would expand the program to “partner countries” within weeks.

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OpenAI hasn’t always been this comfortable with war and the military. Until January 2024, its usage policy flatly banned military and warfare activity of any kind. That line quietly disappeared from the policy page on January 10 of that year, days before CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI’s VP of global affairs told reporters at Davos that the company was already building cybersecurity tools with the Pentagon.

Not everyone reads Big Tech’s Ukraine support as pure goodwill, either. Jamie MacColl, a cyber researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC that Western firms also gain valuable intelligence from an active war zone. “It’s no surprise that OpenAI is now also providing defensive cyber security services,” MacColl said.

For Kyiv, the motive behind the offer matters less than the outcome. Every vulnerability Daybreak flags before Russia does buy time. OpenAI’s $1 billion pledge said the company would extend the program to partner countries within weeks, and Ukraine’s access, unveiled three weeks later, is the clearest sign yet of that promise in motion.