Akrites, a new Linux Foundation initiative backed by many of the world’s largest tech and financial firms, is the industry’s latest attempt to get ahead of AI‑accelerated software supply chain risks by hardening critical open source projects before attackers can exploit them.
On June 25, the Linux Foundation unveiled Akrites, a coordinated industry program designed to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in open-source software exploited by AI-based attackers.
It’s not the first such effort. But Akrites may be the most comprehensive. One such initiative is Chainguard’s Athena coalition, which seeks to repair open-source flaws before attackers can exploit them. Another is IBM and Red Hat’s Project Lightwell, which has similar goals.
These two, however, seek to provide safe code and a platform for managing compliance, SBOMs, and governance across heterogeneous open‑source supply chains. Akrites’ mission, on the other hand, is to give the industry “one coordinated way to fix vulnerabilities upstream before they’re exploited.” In this approach, maintainers stay in control. Its focus is squarely on open-source software projects and ecosystems rather than on any one enterprise’s stack.
The reason all of these projects are appearing now is simple. Frontier AI models have proven they can scan large codebases and find exploitable bugs in minutes. How bad is it? At the United Nations Open Source Week conference, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin said, “The mean time to exploit a vulnerability in software is now negative seven days.” In other words, by the time you find out there’s a security hole in your program, the hackers have had a week to exploit it.
It used to be that discovering and weaponizing serious flaws required deep expertise. Now, anyone with access to a top-level AI LLM can find security holes.
So it is that the Linux Foundation is positioning Akrites as a way to move defenders together, rather than leaving maintainers and individual vendors to fight a rising tide of machine‑generated vulnerability reports alone.
The effort launches with an unusually broad coalition of cloud providers, AI labs, financial institutions, telecoms, and security vendors. Founding commitments come from Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, the Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler. You may have noticed that the companies I mentioned previously as having their own initiative are backing Akrites as well.
That said, as Mike Dolan, the Linux Foundation’s SVP of Legal, noted, “the space is crowded, and the track record is mixed. What I think is genuinely different here is narrow: one coordinated process, so open source maintainers face a single partner instead of a hundred separate reporters. It’s not to say everyone will go through Akrites – many may not, but those who do help reduce the noise for maintainers.”
All that AI-generated noise has been a real problem. On the plus side, AI reports today are far more accurate. On the negative side, that’s still an enormous number of bugs.
Moreover, vulnerability disclosure for open source is often anything but coordinated. Maintainers are flooded with overlapping or conflicting reports from multiple companies, governments, and independent researchers. Different teams may privately discover the same issue, develop competing patches or forks, and send them upstream via separate channels. Even when everyone is acting in good faith, the result can be noise, fatigue, and fragmentation.
Akrites is intended to replace that ad hoc model with a single, predictable entry point:
- A shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) will serve as the trusted coordination partner for open-source maintainers, receiving vulnerability reports and managing remediation across projects.
- A standardized, confidentiality‑first Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process will rely on the familiar ecosystem of CVE identifiers, traffic light protocol (TLP) markings, common weakness enumeration (CWE), CVSS severity scoring, EPSS exploit prediction, SSVC decision‑support, and VEX statements to track exposure and communicate risk.
- Fixes will flow back to each project’s original home on the maintainers’ terms, with Akrites explicitly committing not to “fork and fragment” open source as part of its response.
The idea is to give maintainers one clear signal—validated vulnerabilities and well‑tested, coordinated fixes—rather than a flood of duplicative requests.
As Dan Lorenc, Chainguard’s CEO and co-founder, remarked, “The software supply chain is only as strong as the upstream it draws from, and we see how thin that layer really is. As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven’t touched a project in years. Akrites gives the industry one coordinated way to fix vulnerabilities upstream before they’re exploited, with maintainers still in control. Now the work is making sure there’s always someone on the other end to catch them.”
To address that last issue. Akrites promises to step in when a critical package has no active maintainer. In that “maintainer of last resort” role, Akrites will coordinate fixes to the latest supported versions so downstream users aren’t left stranded when essential libraries or tools go unmaintained.
Given how many legacy components sit deep within modern dependency graphs, this piece may prove as important as the AI‑driven discovery story. Sonatype’s Brian Fox, steward of Maven Central, underscores the leverage of upstream work: one vulnerable component can lie beneath thousands of organizations, and a single upstream fix can reduce risk across an entire ecosystem.
We can only hope that Akrites is successful. Even though Anthropic’s LLMs are part of the problem, Anthropic’s Deputy CISO Jason Clinton said, “Open-source projects collectively underpin much of the internet, and the existing model for coordinated disclosure has been outpaced by how quickly AI can now find vulnerabilities. Getting ahead of that requires the industry to coordinate on findings and get fixes upstream before they’re disclosed and exploited. Efforts like Akrites drive this level of coordination at the scale and speed this moment requires.”
Akrites will receive initial funding from Alpha‑Omega, the Linux Foundation‑directed fund that has already backed large‑scale efforts to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in critical open-source projects. Needless to say, the Linux Foundation will welcome anyone else who wants to contribute engineering resources or additional funding to the cause.
If Akrites succeeds, maintainers could gain a strong, organized ally just as AI shifts the economics of attack toward speed. If it falters, the same AI‑driven pressure that motivated its creation will continue to stress the open-source software our economy relies on. Open-source development and security are no longer something that happens in basements. While individual maintainers are still the spark-plugs of open-source development, they, and even the largest companies, need a coordinated industry-wide security initiative like Akrites to enable them to create, maintain, and support secure open-source software.
