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” 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. 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.

Initial participants include Python, Go, cURL, Sigstore, NATS Server, aiohttp, freenginx, pyca/cryptography, and python.org.