In a livestreamed keynote on Thursday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman announced Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, a new global initiative to help frontline defenders use frontier cyber AI to protect essential services. The initiative is an expansion of OpenAI’s existing Daybreak, which the AI company describes as “a governed cyber defense stack,” comprising frontier models, the Codex harness, Codex Security, trusted workflows, and ecosystem partners. The goal is to help cyber defenders better manage cyber risks by bringing governed defensive capabilities via Daybreak into their existing tools and workflows.Daybreak for Frontline Defenders builds on that effort by expanding subsidized access and support for frontline cyber defenders tasked with protecting critical infrastructure and services. What OpenAI is offeringWith Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, OpenAI is continuing its $1 billion commitment to expand subsidized access to Daybreak cyber models, training, technical support, and partnerships. The initiative will support frontline defenders in both the United States and around the world.Stateside, the project includes Daybreak for America to help protect critical systems, like those used for water, electricity, local government, and banking. This includes launching a pilot with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a cybersecurity partner for U.S. government organizations. Together, the two organizations will work to train and support state, local, tribal, and territorial cyber defenders. Plus, OpenAI’s initiative builds on the Daybreak Defense Network, an ecosystem of more than 350 enterprise products and partner-operated services.OpenAI continues its broader cyber defense push A spokesperson for OpenAI tells The New Stack that its new Daybreak for Frontline Defenders “build[s] on a broader push to get advanced cyber capabilities into defenders’ hands.” It’s certainly doing the legwork. Daybreak for Frontline Defenders “build[s] on a broader push to get advanced cyber capabilities into defenders’ hands.” An OpenAI spokesperson also told The New Stack this week that the AI company rallied utility companies across 40 states and the District of Columbia to help them use OpenAI tools to harden cyber systems.Before that, it joined more than 150 organizations across cybersecurity, technology, critical infrastructure, finance, and AI to publish “an open letter for a global surge in cyber defense,” issuing “a call for collective action on cyber defense.” OpenAI’s financial support enabled teams “to review code and system configurations, validate findings, develop patches, and confirm fixes without disrupting essential services.”On Wednesday, Sam Altman was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to speak at the G20 Innovation Ministerial on the urgency of amping up cyber protections for critical systems and services: “I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently,” he said, as reported by CNBC.Things are already going very wrong. In July, cyber actors targeted U.S. water and wastewater systems, as confirmed by the FBI. In response, OpenAI stepped in to offer affected states and utilities $1 million in no-cost API credits, Daybreak access, and technical assistance. As an OpenAI spokesperson tells The New Stack that OpenAI’s financial support enabled teams “to review code and system configurations, validate findings, develop patches, and confirm fixes without disrupting essential services.”New models, more threats — more urgencyDaybreak for Frontline Defenders builds on OpenAI’s recent spree of cyber defense efforts. This latest initiative comes after OpenAI already expanded Daybreak in August with the release of two tiers: Daybreak Red and Daybreak Blue. The former provides access to GPT-5.6 Cyber for advanced security work, like finding zero-days, building exploit chains, and handling other advanced security tasks, while the latter gives approved defenders access to GPT-5.6 Sol for secure code review, malware analysis, incident response, patch validation, and vulnerability discovery.But OpenAI isn’t the only team focused on steering frontier models for cyber defense. As The New Stack reported in May, OpenAI’s Daybreak and Anthropic’s Glasswing, an industry consortium powered by Claude Mythos Preview, have nearly identical benchmarks — and even a few of the same partners. Both initiatives aim to put frontier AI capabilities in the hands of cyber defenders, albeit with different harnesses and deployment models. Specifically, OpenAI says it has its eye on helping defenders strengthen existing security workflows, e.g., finding and validating vulnerabilities before software ships; investigating threats, improving detections, and supporting response for defensive operations; and conducting authorized security testing. From both teams, the push to help defenders harden cyber defenses against increasing threats is, indeed, becoming more urgent as frontier models advance. Also on Thursday, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, saying it has crossed the Critical cybersecurity threshold in its Preparedness Framework. The post OpenAI spends $1 billion to expand Daybreak to defend power, water, and banking appeared first on The New Stack.