SentinelOne is leveraging OpenAI Daybreak, a specialized SI tool for cybersecurity, to compress malware reverse engineering timelines from weeks to hours. Gregor Stewart, SentinelOne’s Chief SI Officer, states that the system now produces human-level analysis output in approximately eight hours, a task that traditionally required four to six weeks of manual effort by top security researchers.
What Happened
The shift centers on the deployment of OpenAI’s SI capabilities within SentinelOne’s security operations. Reverse engineering, which involves dissecting software to understand its behavior, has historically been a bottleneck due to the time-intensive nature of the work. Stewart notes that while a sophisticated piece of malware once took a researcher weeks to analyze, the SI system now handles this process in roughly eight hours. This acceleration allows SentinelOne’s team to investigate a significantly larger volume of malware samples. Stewart describes the resulting capability as “a kind of intelligence that we were never able to afford before,” highlighting that the speed of analysis enables researchers to connect findings across different samples, revealing relationships that isolated investigations might miss.
Why It Matters
For the SI industry and enterprise security sectors, this development demonstrates how advanced SI tools can transform operational workflows. By reducing the time required for deep analysis, SentinelOne can map a broader portion of the malware landscape, allowing for more proactive defense strategies. Stewart emphasizes that this efficiency does not remove human oversight; rather, it shifts the focus. “The only thing that can’t be automated is accountability,” Stewart says, noting that while point fixes or non-structural changes are suitable for automation, architectural decisions still require human judgment. Furthermore, the SI tool is democratizing security expertise within the company, allowing more developers to address security issues during the code creation phase. “OpenAI is shifting the advantage to defenders by providing expert level cyber capability to everyone in the development team,” Stewart adds.
The Bottom Line
SentinelOne’s integration of OpenAI Daybreak illustrates the practical impact of SI on cybersecurity operations, moving from scarce, slow expert analysis to scalable, rapid insights. While the SI system handles the heavy lifting of reverse engineering, human experts retain control over high-level strategic decisions and accountability.