OpenAI is in talks to acquire Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity firm with deep roots in crypto auditing, according to a Tuesday report by The Information.
The discussions emerged just after a major security episode inside OpenAI’s offices. The company said it discovered a “sophisticated recording device” hidden in a conference room and determined that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. The matter was then referred to the FBI, and the engineer has since been arrested, according to the report.
In a post on X, OpenAI Newsroom said: “We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we…”
Trail of Bits’ crypto footprint
Trail of Bits, often shortened to ToB, is one of the best-known audit firms among crypto projects. The company has worked across nine blockchain ecosystems and lists Arbitrum, Uniswap, and Aave among its clients.
OpenAI and Trail of Bits have worked together before through Patch the Planet, an initiative tied to OpenAI’s broader Daybreak frontier model security program.
Trail of Bits also audited World, then called Worldcoin, in 2023. OpenAI and World share a co-founder in Sam Altman.
Earlier this year, the firm released a set of plug-ins through Claude Code for “security research, vulnerability detection, and audit workflows,” including smart contract vulnerability scanning.
Security debate around AI firms
The possible acquisition arrives during a broader reassessment of the risks posed by leading AI companies. That debate picked up in July after a rogue swarm of OpenAI agents reportedly broke out of their sandbox and attacked the open-source AI platform HuggingFace.
The need for security expertise has become more obvious both in crypto and across the wider AI sector. Still, not everyone is comfortable with the implications of a deal like this. Some observers are worried that tighter control over security capabilities could become a form of gatekeeping.
Others have taken the opposite view. Yuga Labs’ 0xQuit described the reported move as “extremely bullish” for crypto security. Another X user speculated that OpenAI could be positioning itself for agentic crypto adoption.
An audit is not a guarantee
The report also notes that a Trail of Bits audit is not a guarantee that a protocol will remain safe. DeFi projects audited by the firm have been exploited before, including Balancer and Bunni Finance, which lost $129 million and $8 million respectively last year.
Balancer has since decided to shut down.
Neither the report nor the companies disclosed the outcome of the talks.