American tech giant IBM and its IT services subsidiary Red Hat said Thursday that they would deploy billions of dollars and thousands of staff to secure open source software against new cybersecurity threats.
Dubbed "Project Lightwell" and valued at $5.0 billion by IBM in a statement, the scheme follows reports of the powerful capabilities of recent AI models in discovering and exploiting holes in computer security.
A subscription service, Lightwell would use "advanced AI capabilities to validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open source code," IBM said.
Silicon Valley AI developer Anthropic "recently reported that its Mythos Preview model identified nearly 3,900 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in open source software alone," it noted.
Saying it was concerned about the model's offensive cyber capabilities, Anthropic has released Mythos to a limited set of partners rather than the general public, aiming to secure a head start on fixing vulnerabilities it found.
