Also: Treat your AI agents like eager but misguided human interns - before you lose control

Something had to be done. As the company's CEO and co-founder, Dan Lorenc, wrote on LinkedIn, we had a "choice between letting open-source security fragment into a dozen rival patch sets nobody can reconcile, or doing the hard, coordinated thing instead. I said it would only work if we built it together, and admitted I had no idea if we actually would. Here's the update: the industry showed up. It's called Athena, and it's live."

Anthony Grieco, Cisco's SVP, chief security and trust officer, agrees. "For decades, Cisco has helped secure the open-source ecosystem. That work now faces new urgency; frontier AI has accelerated the vulnerability discovery cycle beyond what traditional coordinated disclosure was built to handle. Chainguard's Athena Coalition represents an important evolution, the coordination of open-source vulnerability intelligence and defense at the pace these threats demand."

Athena comes with two parts. The first is a coalition of more than two dozen companies that will collaborate to hunt down and remediate flaws in widely used open-source software using cutting-edge AI models. Its supporters are a who's who of finance and enterprise infrastructure companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Cloudflare, Docker, Kyndryl, and PwC.