The Information’s Valida Pau and Amir Efrati reported Tuesday afternoon that OpenAI is in early talks to buy Trail of Bits, the New York security research and audit firm, as it tries to build a real cybersecurity business. The size of the potential deal couldn’t be learned, the talks are ongoing, and they could still fall apart, per people familiar with the matter (The Information). Neither company has announced anything.
What Trail of Bits is. Founded in 2012, with more than 40 employees per The Information’s reporting. It’s the shop people hire to audit cryptography, compilers, blockchains and critical open-source code, and it builds a lot of the fuzzing and static-analysis tooling that other auditors quietly use.
They already work together. In June, OpenAI launched Patch the Planet under its Daybreak program, built with Trail of Bits. Trail of Bits engineers ran GPT-5.5-Cyber and Codex Security against 19 open-source projects in the first week, including cURL, Go, Python, Sigstore and pyca. Trail of Bits reported 64 pull requests and 51 issues filed in that first week, with every finding reviewed by a human before it reached a maintainer (Trail of Bits; OpenAI). More than 30 projects have since committed to the program.
Why OpenAI would want it. Frontier models now find bugs faster than anyone can verify them. OpenAI’s own Patch the Planet write-up says the models produce a high volume of false positives, and that the human triage step is where the value is. That step is Trail of Bits. Owning it turns “our model found 500 bugs” into “our team shipped 60 merged fixes,” which is the version an enterprise CISO or a federal buyer will actually pay for.
The money. Deal value: Undisclosed. The Information notes OpenAI has sometimes paid in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, in stock, for small startups, and sometimes less. Trail of Bits’ revenue and any prior valuation: Undisclosed. Treat any number you see on X tonight as a guess.
What we’d do if we ran security this week.
If Trail of Bits is mid-audit on your code, nothing changes today. But read the engagement letter for assignment and confidentiality terms, and ask in writing where your findings and source snapshots live if ownership changes.
If you’re buying AI-assisted vuln discovery from anyone, ask for their merged-fix rate, not their finding count. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story of this deal.
And if you run a security services firm, this is the template. Model labs need humans who can prove a bug is real. Expect more of these conversations.
The read. It’s early talks, not a signing. Still, the pure-play audit firm becoming part of a model lab is a real shift. It says the labs think verification, not discovery, is the scarce part of security now.