Google has launched the Fairwind Program, a limited-access initiative that gives governments and trusted partners access to the company's most advanced cyber defense capabilities. The announcement was made on September 2, 2026, in a blog post by Four Flynn, Vice President of Security and Privacy at Google.

Until now, defenders seeking to adopt advanced AI have faced a difficult dilemma, Google noted. They could adopt enormous frontier models that could be expensive to deploy and difficult to control across enterprise codebases, or turn to smaller open-weight models that might struggle with complex vulnerability remediation and would require teams to build their own tooling and infrastructure from scratch.

The Fairwind Program is designed to close that gap. It brings Google's AI and cyber defense capabilities to a trusted group of Google Cloud customers, government agencies, and cybersecurity partners to help them proactively address cyber risks at scale. As a first step, the program will give defenders access to advanced Gemini models that can autonomously find and fix vulnerabilities, with the aim of protecting critical infrastructure, public services, and national security. The initiative arrives as government cyber authorities, including US agencies such as CISA, have in recent years pressed organizations to shrink the window between vulnerability disclosure and patching, since attackers routinely exploit known flaws before defenders remediate them.

Finding and Autonomously Fixing Vulnerabilities

The Fairwind Program offerings combine Google's most advanced cyber model, Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, with the company's CodeMender harness to help defenders find, verify, and fix vulnerabilities at agentic scale. As Google put it: "Spotting weaknesses creates awareness and fear; autonomously finding and fixing vulnerabilities delivers security."

According to the company, CodeMender with Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber delivers the specialized reasoning needed to write and validate code fixes at a fraction of the operating cost of traditional frontier models. Instead of taking weeks to manually fix vulnerabilities, defenders can generate verified, deployment-ready patches in minutes, within their organization's own secure cloud environment.

Scaling Frontline Defense

Google said that providing early access to these capabilities gives trusted defenders a vital adaptation window to harden their systems before bad actors have a chance to exploit similar new capabilities. Initial access is being staged to the government and enterprise partners Google considers most critical to society's resilience:

• Governments and national cyber authorities: Hardening public-sector networks and citizen services against targeted intrusions.
• Critical infrastructure operators: Protecting essential services across healthcare, telecommunications, energy, and financial networks from operational disruption.
• Core technology platforms: Securing widespread software foundations to uplift digital security for millions of downstream users at once.

To ensure the AI capabilities are used responsibly, participating organizations must agree to strict operational standards. These include limiting access to employees within internal cybersecurity, incident response, or penetration testing teams, and deploying protections such as multi-factor authentication.

Google said it has more than 650 participating partners globally.

Program Evolution and Availability

The Fairwind Program will evolve alongside partners' and users' needs, according to the company. Google said it will adapt its product offerings and expand partner access, collaborating closely with industry, governments, and open-weight community leaders to balance open access against robust security. The outcome of that balance is likely to shape how other AI and cloud vendors structure access to security-focused frontier models, as several major providers now offer AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and code-fixing tools of their own.

While Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber access is being prioritized for Fairwind Program customers, any Google Cloud customer can proactively secure their code using CodeMender with publicly available models hosted on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, in combination with solutions offered through AI Threat Defense.

Ecosystem-Scale Investment in Cyber Defense

Google said that years of pioneering zero-trust architecture, advanced AI defenses, and built-in security allow it to protect billions of accounts daily. The Fairwind Program builds on this experience and forms part of the company's broader commitment to global cyber resilience across the digital ecosystem, including grassroots cyber defense.

Through Google.org, Google's latest commitment brings its total cybersecurity funding to more than $100 million globally. The company also released its 2026 Google.org US Cybersecurity Impact Report, which details $36 million in funding for 35 cyber clinics to date. Those clinics provide free, hands-on security support to more than 1,250 hospitals, public school districts, and municipal utilities in the United States.

A Security Advantage

Google framed the program's value proposition in terms of speed: the defender's edge comes from shrinking the time between detecting a flaw and patching it. Through the Fairwind Program, government and enterprise partners gain autonomous tools to repair systems faster and at scale, which the company says keeps them one step ahead of agentic-speed threats.

The original announcement is available on the Google DeepMind blog.