OpenAI will give Ukraine's government free access to its Daybreak cyber defence programme to help protect hospitals, power plants and telecom networks from relentless Russian cyberattacks, the company announced on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
The agreement was announced jointly by Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine's Consul General in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, OpenAI's head of national security policy.
Under the deal, OpenAI will work with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation to give government teams AI tools that can find software vulnerabilities and help develop and test fixes more quickly.
Access to OpenAI's advanced GPT-5.6 Sol model is bundled with Daybreak.
“Ukraine is already on the front line, and its defenders need support now,” Baker said. “We want to put more capable tools in their hands to help them find and fix vulnerabilities and protect the critical networks people depend on.”
George Osborne, the former UK chancellor who now heads OpenAI for Countries, framed the move in stark terms: “Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services.”
A country under constant digital assault
Ukraine is dealing with cyberattacks at a scale few countries experience.
CERT-UA, the national incident response team, handled 5,927 cyber incidents during 2025, up 37.4 percent on the previous year.
Local authorities, government organisations, and the security and defence sector were among the most frequently targeted, with attacks aimed at hospital systems, the energy sector and telecommunications networks.
Russian offensive cyber operations have been a key component of the Kremlin's aggression against Ukraine since 2014, and attacks on Ukrainian utilities predate the full-scale invasion, with grid operator disruptions documented as far back as 2015.
What Daybreak does
Daybreak is OpenAI's programme for giving vetted cyber defenders access to its more capable models with fewer of the restrictions normally placed on cybersecurity requests.
Its defensive tier, Daybreak Blue, supports work including vulnerability discovery, secure code review, malware analysis, incident response and patch validation, letting government analysts query the system in plain language rather than writing custom detection scripts.
The programme already has a track record in Europe.
OpenAI says the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA has used its models to identify vulnerabilities in software deployed across EU institutions, which have since been fixed.
Poland's CERT Polska has also used OpenAI models to uncover six vulnerabilities in third-party router software, with the vendor subsequently releasing patches.
Rafe Pilling, director of Sophos’ Counter Threat Unit, said Ukraine was most likely to use Daybreak and GPT-5.6 Sol as a “force multiplier” rather than an autonomous defensive system — a welcome development for the country’s already capable but heavily burdened cyber defenders.
Jamie MacColl, a senior research fellow specialising in cybersecurity at the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC that Western tech companies have been supporting Ukraine for some time, and that access to Daybreak would be useful given the scale of Russian cyberattacks targeting the country.
OpenAI did not disclose a dollar figure or contract length for the access grant. The company has previously restricted commercial access to its models for state actors engaged in offensive cyber operations while carving out exceptions for defensive use by allied governments.
