OpenAI will provide Ukraine with free technology for cyber defense of civilian infrastructure

Ukraine has gained access to OpenAI’s Daybreak programme, as announced by the company on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Thanks to this, Ukrainian specialists will be able to protect power plants, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure facilities

Daybreak will be able to identify vulnerabilities in digital systems and help address them. In addition, Ukraine has gained access to the advanced GPT-5.6 Sol model.

In 2025, Ukraine’s national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) recorded nearly 6,000 cyberattacks.

‘Ukraine has shown under the most extreme pressure that cyber defence is a central part of national security. Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services’, George Osborne, Head of OpenAI for Countries, said.

In a comment to the BBC, Jamie MacColl, Senior Research Fellow in Cybersecurity at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), added that Western technology companies have been supporting Ukraine ‘for some time’, in particular to gain access to data and intelligence from a real-world war. In addition to OpenAI, Ukraine also has access to similar technologies from Google.

‘Given this, it is no surprise that OpenAI is now also providing defensive cyber security services’, he said.

At the same time, Russia also uses technology from Western companies to attack Ukraine. In September, Anthropic reported that its Claude platform was accessed via VPNs to program Russian drones and attempt to gain unauthorized access to Ukrainian government services.