OpenAI announced it will provide its AI cyber defense system Daybreak to the Government of Ukraine for free. The program is intended to support the cyber defense of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, including hospitals, power plants, and telecommunications systems.

The announcement was made on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York by Dmytro Kushneruk, Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, Head of National Security Policy at OpenAI. Kushneruk spoke at an event in New York City about a partnership with OpenAI to use their cyber models to protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.

OpenAI will work with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation to provide Ukrainian teams with access to Daybreak tools. Under the agreement, Ukraine will receive access to OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol model. Daybreak allows users to identify software vulnerabilities, investigate suspicious activity, validate vulnerabilities, and develop and test fixes.

According to CERT-UA, Ukraine recorded nearly 6,000 cyber incidents in 2025. George Osborne, Head of OpenAI for Countries, said: "Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services."

Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat intelligence at Sophos, said: "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." Jamie MacColl, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said: "Given this, it's no surprise that OpenAI is now also providing defensive cyber security services."

Why It Matters

The deployment of Daybreak addresses a high volume of digital threats against Ukrainian civilian sectors. With nearly 6,000 incidents recorded in 2025, the integration of AI-driven vulnerability identification and fix testing aims to reduce the operational burden on local defense teams protecting essential services.

This agreement extends a pattern of OpenAI providing similar cyber defense tools to European partners. The company previously extended access to defenders in France, Germany, and Poland. The EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA used these models to identify vulnerabilities in software used across EU institutions, all of which were subsequently fixed. In Poland, the national cyber agency CERT Polska used OpenAI models to discover six vulnerabilities in third-party router software, for which the vendor released fixes.

What's New

Additional details indicated that OpenAI has already extended similar cyber defense tools to France, Germany, Poland and other European partners, including the EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA. OpenAI will work with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation to provide Ukrainian teams with access to Daybreak tools. The announcement was made on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York by Dmytro Kushneruk, Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, Head of National Security Policy at OpenAI. OpenAI previously provided access to its cyber models to defenders in European countries including France, Germany, and Poland.