OpenAI Expands Cybersecurity Program Before Deploying New Models

OpenAI plans to expand access to a program introduced in February that gives cybersecurity professionals access to frontier models.

The company is scaling up the Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program to thousands of verified individuals and hundreds of teams responsible for defending critical software, it said in a Tuesday (April 14) blog post.

“In preparation for increasingly more capable models from OpenAI over the next few months, we are fine-tuning our models specifically to enable defensive cybersecurity use cases, starting today with a variant of GPT-5.4 trained to be cyber-permissive: GPT-5.4-Cyber,” OpenAI said in the post.

Because AI tools can be used by attackers as well as defenders, OpenAI has safeguards that include making the tools as widely available as possible while preventing misuse, putting the systems into the world carefully and updating them as needed, and supporting defenders across the ecosystem, according to the post.

To expand access to TAC, OpenAI is adding new levels of identity verification. While the company launched the program in February with automated identity verification, it is now expanding it by introducing additional tiers of access for people who are willing to work with OpenAI to authenticate themselves as cybersecurity defenders, per the post.

Individual users can verify their identity, while enterprises can request trusted access for their team. Customers who are already in TAC can request additional tiers of access if they further authenticate themselves as legitimate cyber defenders.

“Over the long term, to ensure the ongoing sufficiency of AI safety in cybersecurity, we also expect the need for more expansive defenses for future models, whose capabilities will rapidly exceed even the best purpose-built models of today,” OpenAI said in the post.

OpenAI initially launched Trusted Access for Cyber as a pilot program in February alongside the release of GPT-5.3-Codex, saying it aimed to accelerate cyber defense research.

AI company Anthropic announced April 7 that it has a program called Project Glasswing that allows select partners to gain early access to the upcoming Mythos model positioned for defensive cybersecurity work.

It was reported Friday (Feb. 10) that the White House is encouraging banks to use Mythos to identify vulnerabilities.