OpenAI on September 3, 2026 introduced Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, a global initiative committing $1 billion in subsidized access to its Daybreak cybersecurity models, training, technical support, and partnerships, and announced a new pilot with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) aimed at state, local, tribal, and territorial cyber defenders.
The OpenAI announcement said the $1 billion commitment will expand subsidized access to Daybreak cyber models and products in the United States and internationally, with the subsidized access targeted to be consumed over the next six months. The U.S. portion, which OpenAI calls Daybreak for America, consolidates the company’s work to protect systems including water and electricity, local government, and banking. OpenAI said it intends to expand the model to partner countries in the coming weeks.
Under Daybreak for America, OpenAI said it will prioritize operators of essential services, including water and wastewater systems and electric grid operators, alongside state and local governments, community and regional banks, nonprofits, open-source maintainers, and other organizations with limited security resources. The company said many of these teams defend complex and often aging systems against faster-moving threats without the budgets, tools, or specialized expertise available to large enterprises.
The MS-ISAC Pilot
The pilot with MS-ISAC is public-sector and water-focused. OpenAI said it will pair Daybreak access with guided training and hands-on assistance for an initial group of public sector and water system defenders, helping them validate and prioritize findings, coordinate remediation, and develop a repeatable approach that can be expanded over time.
MS-ISAC provides cyber-threat intelligence, incident-response support, real-time information sharing, and other shared defenses to thousands of public-sector organizations, including utilities, public hospitals, K–12 schools, and law-enforcement agencies. MS-ISAC, a division of the Center for Internet Security, is the nation’s only cybersecurity resource solely dedicated to serving U.S. state, local, tribal, and territorial government organizations, and places a priority on assisting less-resourced organizations. OpenAI said the pilot is intended to develop a model that could eventually benefit organizations across that broader community.
Daybreak Access Tiers and Current Use
OpenAI launched Daybreak earlier in 2026 to enable verified public- and private-sector defenders to use advanced AI for authorized cyber defense. The program has two access tiers: Daybreak Blue supports common defensive work with OpenAI’s mainline models, while Daybreak Red gives approved organizations access to specialized cyber models for more sensitive and technically demanding work. According to OpenAI, thousands of defenders across 2,000 approved organizations and workspaces already use Daybreak, including cybersecurity companies, defense organizations, and law enforcement organizations.
The Daybreak program page describes the offering as a governed cyber defense stack that pairs frontier models with a coding harness, security tooling, trusted workflows, and ecosystem partners. OpenAI describes Daybreak as delivering an agentic defense loop covering inventory, discovery, dynamic validation, ownership assignment, and verified remediation, with people reviewing consequential changes and independently verifying deployed fixes.
Water-System Support and Defender Convenings
The new commitment builds on support OpenAI said it already provided to infrastructure defenders. Following recent attacks on U.S. water systems, the company offered affected states and utilities up to $1 million in no-cost API credits, Daybreak access, and technical assistance. OpenAI said teams used that support to review code and system configurations, validate findings, develop patches, and confirm fixes while water systems remained operational.
OpenAI also said it has convened an ongoing series of meetings with frontline defenders, including utilities, state and local governments, and community banks. The company said this week’s second gathering of utility companies brought together participants representing 40 states and the District of Columbia that collectively provide essential services to more than half of the U.S. population, and that it will continue those convenings as the initiative expands.
Daybreak Defense Network and Defense Factory
Alongside the frontline-defender commitment, OpenAI said partners in its Daybreak Defense Network are announcing more than 35 enterprise products and partner-operated services that bring Daybreak cyber models into the tools, services, and workflows enterprise defenders already use.
OpenAI also said it published its approach to building a Defense Factory this week, describing a continuous, agent-first operation that builds on existing security and engineering tools to find and validate vulnerabilities and prepare tested fixes for review. The company said it is sharing the architecture and lessons so other defenders can adapt the approach to their own environments.
OpenAI pointed eligible state and local governments, critical infrastructure operators, nonprofits, open-source maintainers, and supporting organizations to the Daybreak website for information on access, technical assistance, training, and other cyber-defense support.
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