OpenAI unveils 'Aardvark,' a GPT-5-powered agent for autonomous cybersecurity research

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. In the year full of AI agents, OpenAI has launched AI assistants that can take action on your behalf to help you research, shop, and code -- and now even act as a security researcher. Also: 96% of IT pros say AI agents are a security risk, but they're deploying them anyway Aardvark, OpenAI's new agentic security researcher powered by GPT-5 and released Thursday, can assist security teams by identifying and helping patch vulnerabilities. The agent is meant to tackle existing challenges in the software security space, as tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are discovered across enterprise and open-source codebases every year, the company said in the blog post. OpenAI noted that Aardvark began as an internal tool to help its own developers. "Our developers found real value in how clearly it explained issues and guided them to fixes. That signal told us we were on the path to something meaningful," Matt Knight, VP at OpenAI, told me. Simply put, Aardvark is an agent that, when connected to a repository, can discover, explain, and help fix security vulnerabilities. It achieves this by leveraging LLM-powered reasoning and tool use, and taking a unique approach that can be divided into easy-to-understand stages. Also: AI is making cybercriminal workflows more efficient too, OpenAI finds As Knight explained to me, Aardvark will first examine the repository to understand what the codebase is for and its security implications, ...