OpenAI Teams Up with Cathedral
OpenAI has announced a partnership with cybersecurity startup Cathedral as part of a broader effort to improve the security of its AI tools, according to a blog post published by OpenAI on Monday. Cathedral's team will utilize OpenAI's models alongside internal teams to challenge defenses, find weaknesses, and protect platforms. Additionally, OpenAI stated it is more than quadrupling rewards for critical findings through its own bug bounty program.
Background on Cathedral and its Founders
Cathedral launched earlier this year following a $160 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, resulting in a reported valuation of $1.4 billion. According to Reuters citing anonymous sources, Cathedral's mission involves strengthening the U.S. military's cyber capabilities against adversaries like China. The startup's founders—Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Jack Stein—previously worked as deputies under Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Cathedral previously gained attention by hacking into Anthropic's private systems as part of that lab's bug bounty program. According to statements given to the Washington Post, Cathedral claimed the hack took under twelve hours and accessed sensitive information including Slack messages, job offers, and meeting transcripts. Anthropic cybersecurity lead Logan Graham disputed these details on X, stating the hack took several days and that the most sensitive systems, such as model weights and Claude conversations, remained unaffected. Graham also noted that Cathedral's approach was unusual and out of scope for relying on multiple third-party vulnerabilities.
Founders' Backgrounds
Cathedral CEO Gavin Kliger previously worked as a senior software engineer at Databricks and served as chief data officer at the U.S. Department of War from December to April of this year, according to LinkedIn. Co-founder Luke Farritor was an intern at SpaceX, a Thiel Fellowship recipient in 2024, and part of the team that won the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge grand prize for using artificial intelligence to decipher an ancient papyrus scroll. Co-founder Marko Elez had stints at SpaceX, X, and xAI.
Broader Security Context
The partnership arrives amid heightened security focus across the tech sector following the discovery of major vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language powering roughly 70% of websites. Because OpenAI's models were used to discover those PHP flaws, the company launched a global effort called “patch the planet” to find and resolve hidden vulnerabilities in popular software.