OpenAI Hires Cathedral, DOGE Alumni Who Breached Anthropic

OpenAI said Monday it has engaged Cathedral, a cybersecurity startup founded by four alumni of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, to stress-test its defenses, Gizmodo reported. Cathedral is the same firm whose bug-bounty run at Anthropic the two companies now describe very differently.

Cathedral said it breached Anthropic in under twelve hours and pulled "Slack messages, job offers, and meeting transcripts." Anthropic's Logan Graham disputed the timeline, saying the operation actually took several days, and said the company's "most sensitive systems, like model weights and Claude conversations" were not affected. Graham called the approach "unusual and out of scope," because Cathedral chained third-party vulnerabilities that sit outside the bounty program's rules.

Under the new arrangement, OpenAI said Cathedral's team "will use OpenAI's models alongside our teams to challenge our defenses, bringing differentiated expertise and approaches to finding weaknesses and helping us protect our platforms." The company also said it is "more than quadrupling our rewards for critical findings" in its public bounty program.

The four cofounders are Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Jack Stein, all former DOGE deputies. Cathedral launched earlier this year at a reported $1.4 billion valuation on a $160 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.