Cato Networks joins OpenAI cyber partner programme

Cato Networks has joined the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, extending the companies' existing work in cyber defence.

The partnership focuses on bringing OpenAI's cyber tools into security workflows used by corporate customers through external partners. It will concentrate on defensive uses, including vulnerability discovery, prioritisation, and faster protection against newly disclosed flaws.

The work also covers joint safety and abuse-prevention standards. The aim is to support controls that monitor and prevent unauthorised activity when advanced AI models are used in operational security settings.

Cato has already worked with OpenAI through the Trusted Access for Cyber programme. In that earlier effort, the companies explored ways to improve the discovery and ranking of common vulnerabilities and exposures, or CVEs.

Defence focus

The latest step comes as cybersecurity groups assess how AI can strengthen defence even as attackers adopt automated tools. The collaboration will examine how AI can support more autonomous protection as vulnerability discovery and exploitation accelerate.

Cato argues that this depends not just on access to models, but on the ability to apply them inside systems that can see activity across an organisation and act on it. Its platform is designed to provide visibility across users, devices, applications, data, cloud resources, and AI interactions, with policy enforcement managed through its cloud infrastructure.

That broad view matters because security teams often need to connect signals from different parts of a business before deciding whether to block, isolate, or investigate an event. By tying AI tools to network and security controls, companies hope to shorten the time between identifying a risk and deploying a response.

Cato pointed to a recent internal milestone, saying it cut time-to-protect for newly disclosed vulnerabilities to 45 minutes using agentic CVE mitigation. The process covered vulnerability analysis, protection generation, validation, and global deployment.

Industry backdrop

The Daybreak programme brings together organisations testing how frontier AI models can support cyber defenders in real-world environments. For suppliers such as Cato, it offers a route beyond internal experiments towards tools embedded in products and services already used by enterprises.

Pressure on corporate security teams has risen as the number of disclosed software vulnerabilities has grown and exploitation cycles have shortened. Security leaders are also grappling with a separate issue: how to govern the use of AI inside their own operations without creating new risks around misuse, poor oversight, or unauthorised access.

Those concerns help explain why the collaboration places as much weight on governance as on speed. Bringing AI into operational security systems raises questions about what actions can be automated, what safeguards are needed, and where human review should remain.

Shlomo Kramer, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cato Networks, set out that argument in a statement announcing the move.

"Security teams are under pressure to respond at machine speed, but speed alone is not enough. AI in security will not be defined by access to models alone. It will be defined by who can connect these models to the data, controls, and architecture needed to protect customers in the real world. The OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program gives Cato the opportunity to work with OpenAI on bringing advanced AI capabilities into the Cato platform to power the next generation of agentic defense and help security teams close the gap between new threats and meaningful protection," said Kramer.

Platform strategy

Cato has been positioning itself around a unified approach that combines networking, security, and access controls in one cloud-based platform. It says that design gives customers a single operational layer for monitoring traffic, applying policy, and securing users and applications across cloud and hybrid environments.

That strategy has become more prominent as businesses try to manage AI use alongside existing infrastructure. Rather than treating AI as a separate category, suppliers are increasingly folding AI monitoring into broader security and network oversight so that user activity, application behaviour, and data movement can be assessed together.

Cato said this shared context is important if AI is to be used safely in cyber defence. It added that any move towards autonomous protection must be matched with governance and human oversight.

The Daybreak partnership places Cato among a wider group of cybersecurity and technology organisations testing how advanced AI can assist defenders as threats evolve more quickly. For enterprise buyers, the practical question will be whether those tools can reduce response times without introducing new operational or control risks.

Cato said enterprises need autonomous protection that evolves at machine speed as AI increases the pace of attacker activity and vulnerability exploitation.