Cognizant and OpenAI bring frontier AI cyber defense from vulnerability discovery to validated fixes

As a member of the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, Cognizant brings the services, security expertise and implementation scale to help enterprises move frontier AI capability into production-grade defense.

TEANECK, N.J., July 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) today announced it is applying GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber, through its Frontier AI Cyber Defense services, to help enterprises move faster from vulnerability discovery to validated, tested fixes. As a member of the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, Cognizant is putting frontier AI capability into its security experts' hands, helping strengthen how clients defend the software they build and operate.

Frontier AI is changing the economics of cyber defense. AI can now help surface vulnerabilities across large, complex codebases with greater speed and scale. But discovery is only the beginning. Protecting the enterprise depends on what comes next: validating which findings are real, understanding their impact, developing and testing a patch and landing the fix before an attacker can act.

The remediation gap is where enterprises must focus their efforts, and where Cognizant has the domain and institutional depth to help deliver, bringing a cybersecurity practice built over more than a decade, with 5,000+ security professionals. Cognizant's deep experience across regulated industries is intended to give clients the institutional muscle to put frontier capability to work at scale.

"Frontier AI has changed the equation for cyber defense, but a model's power only matters in how it is applied inside a real enterprise," said Sandra Notardonato, Global Head of Partner Development and Influencer Relations, Cognizant. "That is where Cognizant's AI Builder approach is designed to deliver. Our security teams bring these capabilities into our clients' code and security operations, helping them move from finding exposures to validating and remediating them. The advantage belongs to defenders who can pair frontier capability with the people and context to apply it responsibly, and that is what we aim to deliver at enterprise scale."

Through its Frontier AI Cyber Defense services, Cognizant's security professionals apply GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber across authorized defensive workflows, including secure code review, threat modeling, vulnerability discovery and validation, detection engineering, threat hunting, and incident investigation and response. These capabilities are designed to embed into the workflows clients already run, with human validation and oversight at every step. They augment the deterministic controls and monitoring enterprises depend on rather than replacing them, accelerating the path from finding to fix while keeping defenders in control.

"Frontier cyber capability reaches more defenders when partners can operationalize it inside the trusted workflows enterprises already use every day," said Colleen Kapase, Vice President of Strategic Global Partnerships and Ecosystems, OpenAI. "Cognizant brings cybersecurity domain depth and delivery scale to help enterprises apply these capabilities responsibly, with the oversight and governance required to move from discovery to validated remediation."

Cognizant applies these capabilities within its own security operations before bringing them to clients, operating as its own Client Zero. Its security teams use GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber across internal defensive workflows, including secure code review, vulnerability triage and validation and pull-request and CI/CD security review, with human validation and oversight at every step. 

In its own environment, Cognizant is applying these capabilities across its estate of products, platforms and internal repositories to accelerate the lifecycle of vulnerability management from discovery to validation through remediation. This operational experience, earned on its own estate, is what Cognizant brings to client engagements.

Cognizant and OpenAI are working together within a framework built for responsible deployment, with scoped access, monitoring and human oversight designed to keep these capabilities in the hands of trusted defenders. It is the foundation for an expanding collaboration, as both companies work to bring frontier cyber defense to more enterprises.

About Cognizant
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) is an AI Builder and technology services provider, bridging the gap between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization's unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, drive tangible outcomes and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at www.cognizant.ai or @cognizant. 

For more information, contact: