OpenAI Partners With Hacktron to Test Third-Party Service Connections

What happened

OpenAI announced a partnership with Hacktron on November 6, 2026, to find vulnerabilities in its systems, concentrating on connections with third-party services and expanding the security firm’s access to frontier models through Daybreak Red. A Bug Bounty Relationship Expands OpenAI became familiar with Hacktron through its Security Bug Bounty program and said it was impressed by the impact of the vulnerabilities the firm’s researchers discovered and disclosed.

To demonstrate access without reading sensitive internal code, Hacktron used an employee’s Codex account to create a harmless pull request in OpenAI’s internal monorepo, then stopped testing. Hacktron’s timeline says OpenAI confirmed a fix roughly 14 hours after the initial report, while Discourse had a fix ready two days after receiving its report.

That gives the partnership a specific target: weaknesses that emerge when applications, identity systems and infrastructure are linked. Hacktron builds AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) for code review, penetration testing and red teaming, and its research has uncovered vulnerabilities in interactions among applications, cloud infrastructure and identity systems.

Those capabilities align directly with the new testing focus. Hacktron’s September 13, 2026 account provides a concrete example.

Its researchers said they chained two critical vulnerabilities on July 25, 2026, to compromise multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, creating potential access to internal repositories and other connected services. The chain combined remote code execution (running programs on a machine from somewhere else) in the Discourse-hosted community forum’s image-processing path with an OpenAI single sign-on issue, allowing the forum compromise to cross into ChatGPT and Codex and then a connected GitHub integration.

It reported the issues through OpenAI’s Bugcrowd program and to Discourse.