By Anton Bridge
TOKYO, June 16 (Reuters) - Japan’s SoftBank Group has launched a cybersecurity product designed to counter breaches enabled by artificial intelligence, the company said on Tuesday.
The "Patching as a Service" product will be rolled out in Japan through a joint venture established last November between SoftBank's domestic telecoms arm, SoftBank Corp, and OpenAI.
The launch deepens ties between the two firms, which have been developing AI system integration services for Japanese businesses,
and comes amid growing fears for the security risks posed by the latest AI capabilities.
Last week the U.S. government suspended access to OpenAI rival Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to foreign nationals over national security concerns.
"We want to create a system where we will be able to defend critical Japanese infrastructure," SoftBank founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said at a presentation to enterprise clients in Tokyo.
"We want to leverage the new weapon of OpenAI to defend, we see this as our obligation," Son added.
SoftBank Group is one of OpenAI's largest backers and its cumulative committed investment by the end of 2026 stands at $64.6 billion.
At present there are around 50 people working on the product rollout and this is set to expand to around 1,000 people, SoftBank Corp chief executive Junichi Miyakawa said at the presentation on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Anton Bridge, Editing by Louise Heavens)
