OpenAI Plans to Acquire Promptfoo to Secure Agentic AI

OpenAI plans to acquire artificial intelligence security platform Promptfoo to accelerate the addition of agentic security testing and evaluation capabilities to OpenAI Frontier.

Upon closing of the acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, OpenAI will integrate Promptfoo’s technology into OpenAI Frontier, which is the company’s platform for building and operating AI coworkers, OpenAI said in a Monday (March 9) announcement.

The Promptfoo platform helps enterprises identify and remediate vulnerabilities in AI systems during development, according to the release. Promptfoo’s suite of tools is used by 25% of Fortune 500 companies, per the release.

When these tools are integrated into OpenAI Frontier, enterprises building agents on Frontier will be able to use them to identify and remediate risks, do so earlier in the development process, and meet the growing governance, risk and compliance expectations for AI, the release said.

“Promptfoo brings deep engineering expertise in evaluating, securing and testing AI systems at enterprise scale,” Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, said in the release. “Their work helps businesses deploy secure and reliable AI applications, and we’re excited to bring these capabilities directly into Frontier.”

Promptfoo Co-Founder and CEO Ian Webster said in the release that Promptfoo was started to provide developers with a practical way to secure AI systems.

“As AI agents become more connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them is more challenging and more important than ever,” Webster said. “Joining OpenAI lets us accelerate this work, bringing stronger security, safety and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems.”

In Promptfoo’s own blog post announcing the deal, Webster and Promptfoo Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Michael D’Angelo wrote that Promptfoo will remain open source and will continue to serve users and customers.

“We will continue to maintain the open-source suite as a best-in-class red teaming, static scanning and evals tool for any AI model or application,” they wrote. “Promptfoo will continue to support a diverse range of providers and models, reflecting the way real teams build and deploy AI systems.”

OpenAI launched Frontier in February, saying the platform provides AI coworkers with shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning, and clear permissions and boundaries.

The company announced at the same time that it also offers the services of human engineers called OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to help enterprises use these AI agents.

Later in February, OpenAI announced that it partnered with four consulting firms to help it deploy the Frontier platform and that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become the exclusive third-party cloud provider for the Frontier program.