IBM and Red Hat Launch $5B Project Lightwell
IBM (IBM) and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5B commitment backed by new frontier AI capabilities and a global force of more than 20,000 engineers to help enterprises secure open-source software. Together, these investments establish a new model for enterprise use of open-source software, from upstream development through production environments. Project Lightwell will establish an enterprise clearinghouse combined with a force of engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale. The clearinghouse will serve as a security coordination layer, using advanced AI capabilities to validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open-source code. These capabilities will be offered through commercial subscriptions, allowing enterprises to integrate secure patches directly into their existing software supply chains with enterprise-grade validation and lifecycle management. IBM and Red Hat have already begun collaborating with a select group of early adopters on Project Lightwell, including Bank of America (BAC), BNY (BK), Citi (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorganChase (JPM), Mastercard (MA), Morgan Stanley (MS), Royal Bank of Canada (RY), State Street (STT), Visa (V) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Project Lightwell builds on IBM and Red Hat's open source, enterprise AI and security, and incorporates learnings from initiatives such as Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's Trust Access for Cyber, with a goal of utilizing new IBM agentic security methods to protect the foundational open source layers that underpin modern enterprise and AI systems.
