OpenAIAnalysisOpenAI partners with Cathedral and quadruples bug bounty payouts to $172,000
What happened.OpenAI announced an upcoming internal security sprint in partnership with cybersecurity firm Cathedral and substantially revamped its Security Bug Bounty program with quadrupled payout tiers.
Why it matters.Frontier AI labs face persistent targeting by sophisticated actors seeking model weights, proprietary architectures, and training infrastructure data. Relying solely on conventional perimeter defenses proves inadequate when autonomous agents interact with internal APIs and code execution tools. Founders operating critical AI infrastructure should pair automated model-assisted red-teaming with aggressive bounty incentives to uncover latent attack vectors.
The technical specifications:
- Model-driven defense: Security researchers from Cathedral will embed alongside OpenAI product engineers, using OpenAI frontier models to stress-test system defenses and probe internal execution boundaries.
- Quadrupled bounties: Base reward ranges for medium, high, and critical vulnerabilities more than quadrupled, with core product criticals paying up to $30,000 and exceptional findings reaching $100,000.
- Researcher loyalty bonuses: Adding report quality multipliers and a five-tier researcher loyalty structure elevates maximum potential payouts for exceptional security submissions to $172,000.
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