OpenAI will provide Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, the agency behind the Diia state-services app, with access to Daybreak, the company's AI-powered tool for identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities.

The offer was announced Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the annual September gathering of world leaders in New York, by Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine's Consul General in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, OpenAI's Head of National Security Policy.

Daybreak is built to hunt down software vulnerabilities—the hidden coding flaws hackers exploit to break into a system—before Russian attackers can find and weaponize them first. The tool runs on GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship large language model, the same class of AI that powers ChatGPT, trained on huge volumes of text and code so it can read software the way a human expert would. It scans aging systems for weak points, checks whether a suspected flaw is actually exploitable, and confirms that a patch truly closes the hole before it ships.

"We are proud to support Ukraine's cyber defenders, who are protecting essential services against attacks every day," said Sasha Baker, Head of National Security Policy at OpenAI. "Ukraine is already on the front line, and its defenders need support now."

The need is acute. Ukraine's CERT-UA computer emergency response team handled nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025, a 37% increase from 2024, with local governments and government agencies hit hardest.

The offer follows OpenAI's September 3 pledge of $1 billion in subsidized Daybreak access for resource-strapped defenders worldwide, which promised expansion to "partner countries" within weeks. Ukraine's access, unveiled three weeks later, marks the clearest sign yet of that promise in motion (OpenAI announcement). Which governments come next, and how fast, will be the clearest measure of whether the pledge scales.

Ukraine is not the first wartime-adjacent government OpenAI has courted. The company already gives cyber agencies in France, Germany, and Poland access to its models. CERT Polska used the tool to catch six vulnerabilities in commercial router software, all of which have since been patched by the vendor (OpenAI on Daybreak for frontline defenders).

OpenAI has not always been this comfortable with war and the military. Until January 2024, its usage policy flatly banned military and warfare activity of any kind. That language quietly disappeared from the policy page on January 10 of that year, days before CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI's VP of global affairs told reporters at Davos that the company was already building cybersecurity tools with the Pentagon. A senior role like Baker's would have had little to do under the old policy.

Not everyone reads Big Tech's Ukraine support as pure goodwill, either. Jamie MacColl, a cyber researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC that Western firms also gain valuable intelligence from an active war zone (BBC report). "It's no surprise that OpenAI is now also providing defensive cyber security services," MacColl said.

For Kyiv, the motive behind the offer matters less than the outcome. Every vulnerability Daybreak flags before Russia does buys time for Ukraine's defenders.