OpenAI brings in ex-DOGE startup Cathedral to attack its own defenses, and quadruples its bug bounties
What's the deal? OpenAI said on 2 November that researchers from Cathedral, the AI security startup founded by former DOGE staffers, will join its next internal security sprint, using OpenAI's own models alongside its teams to try to break its defenses. The aim is to find and fix weaknesses with AI before attackers do. OpenAI has not said when the sprint starts or which systems will be tested. Cathedral co-founder and CEO Gavin Kliger said every company "should be thinking about how to put these capabilities to work".
Bigger bounties: OpenAI is also more than quadrupling the midpoint of its bug bounty reward ranges. A critical flaw in ChatGPT, Codex or the API platform now earns up to $30,000, and exceptional findings up to $100,000, or about $172,000 with new quality, loyalty and campaign bonuses. Unpaid reports already filed get the new rates, and awards from the last 30 days are topped up. In its previous sprint OpenAI put 25% of its product engineers on finding and fixing weaknesses, using Codex to reproduce bugs and draft patches.
Why Cathedral? The months-old company raised $160M at a $1.4B valuation in July, with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia taking board seats, according to Reuters. Last week The Washington Post reported that its AI agents reached parts of Anthropic's internal sales, HR and IT systems in under 12 hours during an authorised test, though Anthropic said Cathedral overstated the national-security angle. Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who says he co-led the founding round with Marc Andreessen, called it one of only a handful of teams "keeping pace" with the "supersonic shockwave that is AI security".
The signal: Frontier labs are now paying outside AI-native red teams to attack them with their own models. Offensive AI security is turning into a business line in its own right, with the labs as its first big customers.
Read more: OpenAI, OpenAI bug bounty update, Interesting Engineering, The Decoder, Shaun Maguire (X)
Image credit: Interesting Engineering / Wikimedia Commons
