IBM has teamed up with its open source subsidiary Red Hat to launch Project Lightwell, a $5 billion initiative that deploys more than 20,000 full-time engineers to hunt down security vulnerabilities in open source software using AI. The early partner list reads like a who's who of finance: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley.
Previously, Red Hat's security tools were mostly confined to its own backyard. Project Lightwell pushes the perimeter outward, covering a wide swath of the open source ecosystem — including AI frameworks, code repositories, and the distributed streaming platform Apache Kafka. The 20,000 engineers are all existing IBM staff, now dedicated full-time to finding and fixing flaws.