A week after Anthropic said it would limit the release its latest artificial intelligence technology to a small number of trusted organizations because of cybersecurity concerns, OpenAI said on Tuesday that it, too, was sharing a similar technology only with a group of partners.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said in a blog post that it would initially share a new A.I. model called GPT‑5.4‑Cyber with hundreds of organizations, before expanding the release to thousands of additional partners in the coming weeks.
“Our goal is to make these tools as widely available as possible while preventing misuse,” the company said. “We aim to make advanced defensive capabilities available to legitimate actors large and small, including those responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, public services, and the digital systems people depend on every day.”
Like Anthropic’s technology, Claude Mythos Preview, GPT-5.4-Cyber is designed to identify security holes in software. Like other tools developed across the long history of cybersecurity, the technology can be used to both attack computer networks and defend them.
By releasing the technology to a smaller group, OpenAI, like Anthropic, hopes to give defenders an edge over attackers. Before Anthropic unveiled Mythos last week, Zico Kolter, an OpenAI board member, called for such an approach in an interview with The New York Times.
“Four or five months ago, we had a step change in what these systems could do,” said Dr. Kolter, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in security and A.I.
But security experts disagree on the best way to handle such technologies. If they are not widely distributed from the beginning, some argue, they will ultimately pose a greater security risk because fewer organizations will be able to defend themselves using the most powerful systems.
Over the past several months, products from the leading A.I. companies have grown more effective in areas like math and computer programming. Because they are adept at coding, they have a knack for finding security vulnerabilities in widely used software. Companies like OpenAI have also honed technologies specifically for this task.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
OpenAI said it would share its new systems with hundreds of members of its Trusted Access for Cyber program, which it unveiled in February as a way to share technologies with cybersecurity professionals and other partners.
The company also said it would reduce cybersecurity-related guardrails on its systems so that professionals could more easily use them to find security vulnerabilities. But as it shares its technologies, it will also work to verify the identity of users in an effort to prevent misuse.
Last week, Anthropic limited the release of Claude Mythos to about 40 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including the tech giants Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as the Linux Foundation, which oversees the Linux operating system, freely available software that is widely used across the internet.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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