OpenAI launches new initiative to help find and patch open-source bugs

OpenAI announced a new initiative on Monday designed to help the open source community improve its cybersecurity game and ward off bugs.

“Patch the Planet,” (which is a not-so-subtle allusion to “Hack the Planet,” the iconic catch phrase from the 1995 movie Hackers) will see OpenAI team up with the security company Trail of Bits to help open source maintainers secure their projects.

OpenAI said security staff from Trail of Bits will work directly with open source maintainers to review potential code issues. OpenAI’s security tools — like Codex Security — will be used to assist in the process.

“Many maintainers are already being asked to sort through more reports, more quickly, with the same limited time and resources,” OpenAI said Monday. “Patch the Planet is built to reduce that burden, not add to it: security engineers review findings before they reach maintainers, work with projects to develop patches and tests, and build reusable workflows that help teams continue improving security after the first fixes land.”

In other words, Trail of Bits engineers will function more or less like code EMTs — there to help open source project maintainers identify and triage potential issues, all supported by OpenAI’s software. It sounds like an ambitious project, and it’s somewhat unclear how it will function in the long term, or how it plans to scale up (if at all).

Open source projects are the digital bedrock upon which the commercial software industry rests, but, unfortunately, due to the decentralized and poorly monitored structure of that ecosystem, much of the software is insecure. Bugs in open-source projects can turn into major problems for commercial codebases. The log4j debacle from several years ago — when a bad vulnerability was discovered in a widely used open source utility — is a good example.

Much of the concern surrounding tools like Mythos (Anthropic’s highly publicized security tool) seems to stem from the fact that AI can now automatically identify existing bugs within codebases and set about creating exploits for them. While the automation of cybercrime is not new, these tools undoubtedly have the potential to make it significantly more convenient for bad actors.

OpenAI is turning that formula on its head by using AI to help the open source community better protect itself. It’s hard not to read it as a competitive swipe at Anthropic, while also recognizing that it’s something the open source community desperately needs.