For years, cybersecurity leaders have faced a frustrating equation: the number of systems that need to be protected keeps growing, while the number of people available to protect them does not. Artificial intelligence could change that equation by giving security teams access to capabilities that previously required armies of specialized analysts.
OpenAI is now calling on the industry to move quickly in that direction. Its new open letter, “A Call to Action on Cyber Defense,” has attracted first-day support from Palo Alto Networks, Mate Security, and ServiceNow, placing the three companies among a select group of cybersecurity market leaders backing the initiative.
The timing is significant. As AI models become more capable, cybersecurity is becoming a race not simply to develop better detection technology, but to determine which side can deploy intelligent systems at greater scale.
The Cost Of Staying Secure
Security teams have never operated in a perfectly maintained environment. Organizations routinely carry outdated systems, unpatched vulnerabilities, excessive privileges and years of accumulated technical debt.
Addressing those problems manually can be expensive and slow. OpenAI argues that the arrival of increasingly capable AI creates an opportunity to change the economics of that work.
“We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses,” the letter states.
The company argues that cyber-capable AI can make security tasks faster and more accessible, potentially allowing smaller teams to cover significantly larger environments.
That matters particularly for critical infrastructure, where security budgets and staffing levels can be constrained even though the consequences of an incident can be severe.
From More Tools To More Capacity
OpenAI’s proposal is notable because it focuses on defensive capacity rather than simply adding another security product to an already crowded market.
The company calls on cybersecurity vendors to strengthen existing tools with AI, continuously test defenses against advanced cyber capabilities and provide hands-on assistance to organizations that may struggle to deploy sophisticated technology on their own.
The objective is essentially to make the work of a security team scale.
If AI can investigate vulnerabilities, analyze threats, validate remediation and support incident response, organizations could potentially increase their defensive coverage without increasing headcount at the same rate.
That is one reason the emergence of agentic cybersecurity companies is attracting attention.
Mate Security’s Different Proposition
Mate Security is approaching the problem by building an open foundation for agentic cyber defense.
Rather than focusing exclusively on AI-assisted analysis, Mate is developing systems in which AI agents can participate directly in investigations. Its Gamebooks technology provides structured investigation procedures while allowing agents to reason, pivot and act as an investigation unfolds.
The distinction is important from an economic perspective. An AI system that simply summarizes an alert may save an analyst minutes. An agent capable of conducting substantial portions of an investigation could potentially change how an entire security operation is staffed and organized.
That does not eliminate the need for human expertise. Instead, it potentially allows security professionals to spend more time on the highest-value decisions while AI handles larger amounts of repetitive or investigative work.
The Established Players Are Moving Too
The participation of Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow shows that this shift is not confined to startups.
Both are established market leaders operating the large-scale platforms that organizations already rely on, and their support for the initiative underscores the extent to which AI is becoming integrated into the broader enterprise market.
They also address different parts of the capacity problem. Palo Alto Networks operates across the security controls and telemetry that enterprises depend on for detection and enforcement. ServiceNow operates in the enterprise workflows where remediation is assigned, tracked and verified, which is often where the cost of security work accumulates.
That second point matters to the economics. Faster investigation produces limited savings if the resulting fixes still move at the pace of manual coordination, and OpenAI’s letter asks organizations to measure progress by whether attacks are contained quickly and whether fixes actually work.
Mate Security represents a newer architectural direction, while Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow illustrate the ability of established platforms to bring AI capabilities into existing enterprise environments.
Together, their participation points toward a market in which AI may increasingly become a baseline component of cyber defense.
The Race For Scale
OpenAI’s letter ultimately argues that defenders need to act before AI-enabled attacks become more sophisticated.
“Sharing tools, practical knowledge, and verified fixes lets one organization’s work help protect many others,” the company says.
That principle could become particularly important as organizations search for ways to improve security without simply increasing spending indefinitely.
The cybersecurity industry’s AI race may therefore be measured in a different way than previous technology cycles. The winners may not necessarily be the companies with the most advanced AI demonstrations, but those that can turn AI into reliable defensive capacity at the largest possible scale.
By joining OpenAI’s initiative as first-day signatories, Palo Alto Networks, Mate Security, and ServiceNow are signaling that the industry is moving toward that model. The question now is how quickly organizations can translate increasingly capable AI into measurable reductions in cyber risk.