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2w ago

IBM and Red Hat Launch $5 Billion Project Lightwell to Secure Open-Source Software

The plan is to combine AI-driven vulnerability detection with a 20,000-strong engineering force to deliver vetted patches to enterprise subscribers.

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The logo of IBM is displayed over a booth at the Web Summit digital trade show in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 12, 2026. REUTERS/Chris Helgren
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Overview

  • IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell on Thursday as a $5 billion program to build a trusted enterprise clearinghouse for open-source security.
  • The clearinghouse will use advanced AI to find, triage, validate, and test vulnerabilities and fixes so enterprises can receive production-ready patches.
  • IBM said it will field more than 20,000 engineers to work alongside AI tools on upstream maintenance, patch development, dependency hardening, and release engineering.
  • The service has been piloted with major banks and payments firms and will be offered as a subscription expected to launch commercially within about 30 days.
  • The effort responds to recent AI-driven scans that flagged thousands of open-source flaws and aims to let companies report bugs confidentially while sharing validated fixes back to upstream projects; IBM also cited its use of more than 62,000 open-source packages to show the scale of the challenge.