OpenAI just made it significantly more lucrative to break its AI models, at least if you’re doing it for the right reasons. The company announced on July 9 that it’s overhauling its biosecurity bug bounty initiative, doubling the maximum reward for discovering universal jailbreaks from $25,000 to $50,000.
The revamped effort, now called the OpenAI Bio Bounty Program, replaces the earlier GPT-5.5 Bio Bug Bounty with something more permanent. Instead of one-off testing windows tied to specific model launches, OpenAI is building an ongoing infrastructure for catching the kinds of vulnerabilities that keep biosecurity experts up at night.
What’s actually changing
The new program covers both GPT-5.6, OpenAI’s latest model, and ongoing evaluations of GPT-5.5 until that model’s original testing window closes on July 27, 2026. The $50,000 top-tier payout applies across both models, with OpenAI retaining discretion to issue partial awards for findings that don’t quite hit the universal jailbreak threshold but still surface meaningful risks.
Participants need to craft a single prompt that effectively answers all of OpenAI’s predefined bio and chem safety questions without triggering the model’s moderation systems.
