Tenable & OpenAI launch AI inspector for cyber agents
Tue, 8th Sep 2026 (Today)
Tenable is working with OpenAI to launch CyberAgents Exchange AI Inspector, a review process intended to assess AI agents and related components before deployment.
The move reflects a joint effort by the cybersecurity company and OpenAI as businesses increase their use of agentic AI tools in enterprise environments.
CyberAgents Exchange AI Inspector is designed to review AI agents, skills, MCP servers and multi-agent playbooks listed on the CyberAgents Exchange, operated by Tenable. The process combines OpenAI GPT cyber models, inspection through Tenable One AI Exposure and review by Tenable researchers.
The aim is to help security teams identify and prioritise risks before community-built AI components are introduced into corporate systems. Tenable framed the initiative as a response to a growing market for shared AI tools built for cyber defence use cases.
The collaboration grew out of Tenable's involvement in the OpenAI Daybreak Defence Network, a programme that brings cybersecurity companies into OpenAI's ecosystem. CyberAgents Exchange AI Inspector is expected to become available in September.
The exchange
The CyberAgents Exchange launched as an open-source registry focused on cybersecurity applications for AI agents and related tools. It now contains more than 100 community-submitted AI components following a recent SWARM build event hosted by Tenable.
That growth points to a broader shift in the security market, as vendors and practitioner communities experiment with AI systems that can carry out multi-step tasks, connect to external services and coordinate with other agents. For security teams, the challenge is that such tools can also introduce new risks through software flaws, unsafe permissions, data handling issues or weak oversight.
By introducing a formal inspection process, Tenable is seeking to add more structure to how those components are assessed before use. Its existing AI exposure technology is intended to support that process by examining risks associated with AI systems and their surrounding infrastructure.
Security concerns
The announcement comes as companies face pressure to adopt generative and agent-based AI while also addressing concerns from security and governance teams. In practice, that has created demand for products and review methods that can test not only models, but also the tools, workflows and connectors built around them.
MCP servers, one of the component types covered by the new process, connect AI systems with outside resources and applications. Multi-agent playbooks are structured workflows in which several AI agents perform separate roles to complete a larger task.
Security specialists have increasingly warned that these systems may expand an organisation's attack surface if deployed without proper vetting. Community-built components can broaden access to innovation, but they can also create uncertainty around provenance, permissions and operational behaviour.
Eric Doerr, Chief Product Officer at Tenable, said the collaboration is intended to address that issue.
"Agentic AI will only reach its potential in the enterprise if security teams can trust the components being introduced into their environments," Doerr said.
"By combining OpenAI GPT cyber models with Tenable's security expertise and researcher review, we're building a more rigorous way to inspect community-built AI components before they're used in enterprise environments. This is an important step in applying frontier AI to help defenders identify and prioritise risk across the growing agent ecosystem."
OpenAI's cyber-focused summit, where the initiative was introduced, brought together security industry leaders to discuss defensive uses of advanced AI systems. The discussions focused on how AI reasoning tools can be integrated into existing security products and workflows to help defenders handle threat findings and remediation more quickly.
For Tenable, the tie-up also extends its effort to position itself in the emerging market for AI security oversight. As organisations test agent-based systems for security operations and other tasks, vendors are competing to offer assessment tools that can give risk teams clearer visibility into what those systems do and how they connect to enterprise environments.