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OpenAI to expand Daybreak cybersecurity initiative to Korea

Published: 27 May. 2026, 15:47

LEE JAE-LIM
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OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon discusses the company's Daybreak cybersecurity initiative at a press conference at the JW Marriott in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on May 27. [OPENAI]

OpenAI is expanding its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative to Korea's public and private sectors, a move that stands in contrast to Anthropic's stringent standards for access to its Glasswing program to foreign countries.

OpenAI will open its Government Trusted Access for Cyber program — designed for government agencies and institutions — to Korea, signing on along with Japan to become one of four user countries, along with the United States and Canada. Participants gain access to OpenAI's latest high-performance AI models.

"We are pretty close to finalizing access for Korean government personnel," said Jason Kwon, the chief strategy officer at OpenAI, at a press event held in southern Seoul on Wednesday. "I think they will need to gain access and use the tools, and we expect them to produce results fairly quickly."

The program will be overseen by the Korea Internet & Security Agency, while the Ministry of Science and ICT is leveraging the partnership to establish ties between the U.S. company and Korea's newly established AI Safety Institute.

OpenAI has flagged Korea as one of the fastest-transforming countries in terms of AI adoption, citing surging user numbers on Codex, OpenAI's coding agent. Kwon said Codex's weekly active users in Korea have grown 10-fold since the beginning of this year, and since the app's launch in February, daily interactions in Korea have increased by more than 30-fold.

"Korea is now among the top five countries globally in terms of Codex's adoption and engagement," Kwon said. "In Korea, 50 percent of Codex requests are noncoding tasks. Codex is being used not just by professional developers but also by people looking to automate repetitive tasks, organize workflows and turn ideas into useful tools for Korean users."

OpenAI's cybersecurity push in Korea comes amid growing fears triggered by Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview — an unreleased AI model so powerful at finding software vulnerabilities that Anthropic chose not to release it to the public. The model had already uncovered thousands of previously unknown security flaws across every major operating system and browser, including bugs that had gone undetected for decades.

Second Vice Minister of Science and ICT Ryu Je-myung, right, poses for a photo with OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon ahead of their meeting at Three IFC in western Seoul on May 26, where the two discussed cooperation on AI security threats and related initiatives. [MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND ICT]

The Glasswing project was formed as a defense initiative to channel the model’s capabilities to patch the world’s digital infrastructure. Anthropic launched the initiative with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, AWS, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, Palo Alto Networks and the Linux Foundation, with more than 40 additional organizations also granted access to scan their own critical software.

Despite discussions held between Seoul and Anthropic earlier this month, Korea's access remains stalled, with domestic reports suggesting that a path in is unlikely.

Reports indicate that the U.S. government holds considerable sway over Glasswing membership. Kwon also noted that data will remain within Korea — a significant assurance given that Korean law strictly limits the transfer of personal data outside its borders.

"We have made data residency available in Korea for a while now, which means that when data is processed, it stays within the country," Kwon said. "The other thing that we can do is also not store the data at all, which we do for some of our customers, which tends to satisfy the requirements around data security."

OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon [OPENAI]

The Daybreak program is divided into separate frameworks for the public and private sectors, with the latter being the Trusted Access for Cyber initiative. OpenAI is currently in talks with several Korean conglomerates to sign them up for the program as well.

Beyond cybersecurity, OpenAI is broadening its partnerships with Korean institutions. On Tuesday, OpenAI signed a memorandum of understanding with Korea Water Resources Corporation to develop AI-powered water disaster management systems capable of addressing climate-driven water crises. Separately, OpenAI also signed a cooperation agreement with the Korea Technology Finance Corporation to support the growth of domestic AI startups, including the development of an AI-based technology assessment system.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [[email protected]]