OpenAI will give Ukraine’s government free access to Daybreak, an artificial intelligence cyber defence system intended to help protect civilian infrastructure including hospitals and power plants from cyber-attacks.
The initiative was announced on September 23, 2026, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly by Dmytro Kushneruk, the Consul General of Ukraine in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, Head of National Security Policy at OpenAI. OpenAI will work with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, though neither side set out a deployment timetable or identified the infrastructure systems that will be addressed first.
Ukraine’s national cyber incident response team, the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine, known as CERT-UA, handled nearly 6,000 cyber incidents in 2025. The cases included attacks on hospital systems, the energy sector and telecommunications, according to CERT-UA. Russian hackers also attacked Ukraine’s railway system in 2025.
Daybreak is designed to find weaknesses in digital systems quickly and assist with developing remedies. Ukrainian cybersecurity officials will use it for automated cyber work including incident response, threat triaging, login analysis, system inventorying, code analysis and validating vulnerabilities.
Under the arrangement, Ukraine will also receive access to OpenAI’s advanced GPT 5.6 Sol model. The company has pledged over $1 billion in subsidized tokens for the initiative. Details of how those tokens will be allocated, and over what period, were not disclosed.
Russian offensive cyber operations have been “a key component” of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014. Russian GRU hackers shut down Ukraine’s power grid in 2015, an early demonstration of the risks that cyber operations pose to essential civilian services.
George Osborne, Head of OpenAI for Countries, said the programme concerned the security of services used in daily life. “Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services.”
OpenAI has already made its cyber models available to defenders elsewhere in Europe, including France, Germany, Poland and others. Previous deployments also include the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, known as ENISA, and Poland’s CERT Polska.
The Ukrainian arrangement comes amid wider concern in the technology sector about artificial intelligence being used to support cyber attacks. Around 100 US companies signed an open letter warning that “the window is closing” to ensure cyber defences are robust enough to withstand AI-enabled cyber attacks.
The same technology can be used for offensive purposes. Anthropic said its Claude platform appeared to have been used by a group of Russian developers to create software for kamikaze drones designed for attacks in Ukraine.
Jamie MacColl, a senior research fellow specialising in cyber at RUSI, noted that Ukraine already had access to AI tools supplied by OpenAI competitors, including Google. The new arrangement gives Ukrainian teams access to another set of tools as they manage a cyber threat affecting systems from healthcare to energy and telecommunications.
Comments (0)