Darktrace Joins the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program to Explore Defensive AI Integrations
Collaboration Will Explore How Darktrace and OpenAI Capabilities Can Support Organisations in Securely Adopting AI, Understanding Its Business Impact, and Strengthening Overall Resilience.
Darktrace, a global leader in AI for cybersecurity, today announced it has been selected to join the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, a cybersecurity initiative that gives security organisations access to OpenAI’s most cyber-capable models on behalf of their customers. Through the programme, Darktrace will work with OpenAI to explore how OpenAI cyber capabilities can be integrated within Darktrace products and services, bringing new capabilities to Darktrace customers.
Daybreak is focused on advancing the safe use of AI for cybersecurity. This next phase expands the programme from internal cyber model testing and controlled defensive use to include scoped product integrations, managed services, and partner-delivered defensive capabilities. Darktrace is part of a select group of trusted partners working with OpenAI to apply OpenAI cyber capabilities within the tools and workflows defenders already use.
Joint initiatives would build on Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI, which helps organisations understand normal and abnormal behaviour across their digital environments. By learning the unique patterns of users, devices, systems, cloud environments, email, identity, network activity, and AI systems, Darktrace builds a real-time understanding of how each organisation operates and where emerging risks may appear. This behavioural understanding is the foundation of Darktrace / SECURE AI™, which extends these capabilities to AI agents to help organisations detect, investigate, and manage the risks created by AI adoption across their organisation.
One initial focus for the partnership is helping customers understand not only that a cyber event is occurring, but what it could mean for the business. By using the advanced models and more precise safeguards made available through the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, Darktrace and OpenAI will combine Darktrace’s real-time behavioural understanding of an organisation’s technology environment, from AI agents to network infrastructure, with OpenAI’s advanced contextual understanding and ability to interpret wider business context.
The integration can give organisations deeper context on technical risk and help them prioritise workloads and investigations based on potential impact to revenue, operations, and resilience. It can also provide security teams and executives with intelligence into which events matter most to the business, why they matter, and what action to take.
“Darktrace has a decade of experience innovating in AI. Our technology learns each organisation from the inside out to give security teams a real-time understanding of behaviour, relationships, and risk across their environments,” said Ed Jennings, CEO at Darktrace. “One of the enduring challenges in cybersecurity has been translating technical signals into meaningful business understanding. By working with the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, we are exploring how Darktrace’s behavioural security can be combined with OpenAI’s advanced contextual capabilities to create a new level of understanding for security teams: not only which events matter most, but why they matter to the business, what actions to take, and how to strengthen resilience.”
Product integrations developed by Darktrace and OpenAI will embed OpenAI cyber capabilities within Darktrace-managed workflows, with constrained inputs, bounded outputs, and controls designed to support authorised defensive use cases. Customers will not receive direct access to OpenAI cyber capabilities or use them as general-purpose cyber assistants. Instead, Darktrace and OpenAI will apply these capabilities through Darktrace-managed product experiences and services, enabling customers to benefit from model-assisted outputs without directly accessing OpenAI models.
