OpenAI will give Ukraine’s government free access to its Daybreak AI cyber defense system to help protect civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and power plants from cyberattacks, the BBC reported on September 23, 2026.
According to Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA), the national cyber incident response team, the country recorded nearly 6,000 attacks in 2025. Daybreak is designed to identify weaknesses in digital systems quickly and help develop fixes. Under the arrangement, Ukraine will also get access to OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5.6 Sol model, which the BBC described as a rival to Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable systems.
George Osborne, former UK chancellor and now head of OpenAI for Countries, said protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks “so people can continue to live, work and access essential services,” the BBC reported. The Next Web, citing OpenAI’s announcement on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, said the company is working with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and that Ukrainian teams will be able to use Daybreak for authorized vulnerability discovery, investigation of suspicious activity, exploit validation, and testing fixes. OpenAI’s Sasha Baker, head of national security policy, said Ukraine’s defenders “need support now” and that the company wants to put more capable tools in their hands. OpenAI’s Daybreak product page frames the stack as a governed cyber defense loop kept under human control.
Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat intelligence at Sophos, told the BBC that Russian offensive cyber operations have been “a key component” of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014 and called any initiative that strengthens Ukraine’s “already highly capable, but heavily burdened” cyber defense a welcome force multiplier. Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute said Western tech firms have supported Ukraine for some time — partly for altruistic reasons and partly because they gain valuable data and intelligence from an active conflict — and that Daybreak access should help given the volume of Russian attacks, while noting Ukraine already has AI tools from rivals such as Google.
The BBC noted that frontier AI cyber capabilities can aid both defense and attack, and that OpenAI has already allowed some European firms and UK banks to use its most advanced cyber models while Anthropic has tightly restricted access to comparable systems. The Ukraine announcement came as the UN General Assembly met in New York with AI on the agenda; this brief covers only the Daybreak-and-Sol access deal for Ukraine’s civilian cyber defense, not separate UNGA AI-standards or rename wires AI Tech Daily covered earlier today.