OpenAI and Trail of Bits already team up on Patch the Planet. Now the AI giant is reportedly weighing an acquisition of the crypto audit stalwart.
OpenAI is in early discussions to buy Trail of Bits, the New York security firm behind some of crypto’s most widely used smart contract tooling, according to The Information. No price has surfaced, and the talks could still fall through.
What’s the Scoop?
Existing partners: The pair launched Patch the Planet in June, putting OpenAI’s Codex and cyber-specialized models in the hands of Trail of Bits engineers to find and fix bugs in critical open-source code. The effort has flagged 1,917 issues across 67 codebases so far, with 462 patches merged upstream.
Crypto pedigree: Trail of Bits has been a top-tier audit shop in crypto for years. It built open-source analyzers like Slither and Echidna and published reviews as recently as September for Offchain Labs and Gensyn.
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Onchain overlap: Patch the Planet’s roster is mostly general-purpose software, but it still touches crypto. It covers Solady, a gas-optimized Solidity library, and the Noble cryptography libraries used across Ethereum’s JavaScript stack.
Why OpenAI cares: A deal would scale up OpenAI’s cybersecurity push as it competes with Anthropic in AI bug-hunting. Anthropic’s Mythos models have stoked exploit fears across crypto.
Time will tell: If this deal closes, the open question for crypto is whether one of its marquee auditors keeps taking protocol engagements under OpenAI’s roof. Either way, its open-source tooling isn’t going anywhere.
William M. Peaster
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William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he covers the onchain frontier with a particular interest in art, games, and other culture apps. He has a background in creative writing and writes fiction in his free time.