OpenAI extends Daybreak cyber access to Ukraine for civilian defense

OpenAI announced on September 23, 2026 that it will give the Government of Ukraine access to its Daybreak program. The program provides cyber defenders with advanced AI tools for authorized security work, with the stated aim of strengthening the protection of civilian infrastructure.

What Ukraine gets

Working with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, OpenAI will give Ukrainian teams tools to identify software vulnerabilities faster and to develop and test fixes in less time. Daybreak covers several defensive tasks: reviewing older software for weak points, investigating suspicious activity, validating vulnerabilities and checking that patches actually work.

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.

Why it matters

Ukrainian defenders face persistent cyberattacks from Russia alongside physical strikes on the country's infrastructure. Ukraine's national cyber incident response team, CERT-UA, handled nearly 6,000 cyber incidents in 2025. They include attacks on hospital systems, the energy sector and telecommunications — the sectors that provide essential services to the population.

"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."

Earlier deployments in Europe

According to OpenAI, the company has already provided access to its cyber models to defenders in Europe, including France, Germany and Poland. The EU's cyber agency, ENISA, used the models to identify vulnerabilities in software used across EU institutions, and all of them have since been fixed.

In Poland, the national cyber agency CERT Polska used OpenAI models to help find six vulnerabilities in third-party router software. The vendor has released fixes, which CERT Polska confirms prevent the attacks it observed.

George Osborne, Head of OpenAI for Countries, said Ukraine has shown under the most extreme pressure that cyber defense is a central part of national security, and that protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks.