OpenAI Partners With Hacktron to Find Vulnerabilities

OpenAI has partnered with Hacktron to find vulnerabilities in its systems, focusing on how its systems interact with third-party services. Engineers from OpenAI and security researchers from Hacktron will jointly select high-priority areas for testing. As part of the partnership, OpenAI is expanding Hacktron’s access to its frontier models through Daybreak Red.

Hacktron builds AI agents for code review, penetration testing, and red teaming. The company's research has uncovered vulnerabilities in how applications, cloud infrastructure, and identity systems interact. OpenAI says it became familiar with Hacktron through its Security Bug Bounty program and noted the impact of vulnerabilities discovered and disclosed by Hacktron's researchers.

The effort is part of a push by OpenAI to accelerate cyber defense using frontier AI while finding and fixing vulnerabilities in its own systems. OpenAI announced earlier in the week that researchers from Cathedral will work alongside its teams in an upcoming security sprint. The company also raised its bug bounty rewards to give independent researchers more reason to pursue vulnerabilities internal testing might miss.

As AI agents connect services in new ways, OpenAI said working alongside Hacktron will help test those connections more deeply and strengthen defenses. Hacktron CEO Zayne Zhang stated that the future of cybersecurity will be defined by combining human creativity with AI-driven capabilities rather than by the size of a security team. Zhang added that putting frontier cyber models in the hands of security researchers enables them to uncover complex vulnerabilities at the boundaries between interconnected systems. OpenAI directed independent researchers seeking to view scope details or submit findings to its Security Bug Bounty program.