OpenAI is in talks to acquire Trail of Bits (ToB), a cybersecurity firm which counts top crypto projects among its clients, according to a Tuesday report by The Information.

The news comes in the wake of a major security incident at the AI giant’s offices, in which it discovered a “sophisticated recording device” in a conference room, planted by an engineer who’s since been arrested by the FBI.

ToB is one of the best known and well-respected auditors among crypto projects, with experience in nine blockchain ecosystems, and counting Arbitrum, Uniswap and Aave as clients.

We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re…

OpenAI and ToB previously collaborated on the “Patch the Planet” initiative, part of OpenAI’s wider Daybreak frontier model security program. In 2023, it also audited World (then Worldcoin), with which OpenAI shares a co-founder, Sam Altman.

Earlier this year, ToB produced a set of plug-ins for “security research, vulnerability detection, and audit workflows” via Claude Code, including smart contract vulnerability scanning.

The potential acquisition comes after a major reckoning for top AI companies and the dangers they present.

The discussion kicked off after a rogue swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of their sandbox and attacked the open-source AI platform HuggingFace in July.

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