Modern AI models have prodigious coding capabilities—whether that poses a greater advantage for legitimate cyberdefenders or for malicious hackers is an open question. Either way, AI companies are thriving.

The cybersecurity sector has been in crisis mode in recent months as the spread of new and powerful AI systems, like Anthropic’s Mythos, has threatened to make much of the world’s existing cyberdefense infrastructure effectively obsolete. On Wednesday, the security company that built PHP, a technology powering as much as 70% of the world’s websites, issued an emergency patch for two major vulnerabilities that, if exploited, would allow hackers to take control of web servers. The vulnerabilities, known as PHP2Shell, were reportedly discovered using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol—an illustration of modern AI models’ aptitude for finding complex security flaws too subtle for humans to notice independently.

Not long after the initial reports of the release of the emergency patches on Wednesday morning, OpenAI announced in a blog post it was launching a framework aimed at fostering global cooperation to find and fix the many vulnerabilities that are likely still out there lurking in old software, waiting to be discovered either by cyber defenders or their black hat adversaries. With one hand, OpenAI is racing with other tech companies to develop the technology that’s actively revolutionizing cybercrime; with the other, it’s positioning itself as the front-line of defense against those same AI-equipped cybercriminals.

“Patch the Planet,” as OpenAI’s new initiative is being called, will aim “to help turn findings into protection and build a response that can scale as AI capabilities advance,” OpenAI wrote in its announcement .

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