OpenAI said on 23 September that it will give the Government of Ukraine access to Daybreak, its programme allowing vetted defenders to use its models for authorised security work: reviewing older software, investigating suspicious activity, validating vulnerabilities and testing fixes.
The work runs through Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. The announcement was made on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly by Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine’s Consul General in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, OpenAI’s head of national security policy.
For context, OpenAI cites CERT-UA, Ukraine’s national cyber incident response team, which handled nearly 6,000 cyber incidents in 2025, including attacks on hospital systems, the energy sector and telecommunications.
Why it matters: the capability that finds software flaws for defenders finds them equally well for attackers, which is why access to this class of tooling is gated rather than sold openly. Extending it to a government under sustained attack is a practical test of whether that gating holds. What the announcement does not say is how long the access runs, what it costs, or what oversight applies to how the tools are used.