The product, called “Patching as a Service,” will be provided in Japan through a joint venture between SoftBank’s telecoms arm, SoftBank Corp, and OpenAI.

It focuses on vulnerability assessments, planning fixes, and advising companies on how to apply them.

SoftBank says it will first target selected firms linked to critical infrastructure. These include organisations whose systems support essential public and business services. Outreach to those companies will begin gradually.

Cybersecurity risks have been increasing as attackers utilise artificial intelligence to speed up and scale breaches. SoftBank says this has made it harder for organisations to keep systems secure, especially when threats change quickly and affect multiple layers of infrastructure.

The company tested the system internally before the rollout. During that phase, SoftBank Corp carried out a large vulnerability assessment across its own systems using OpenAI’s cybersecurity tools.

It said the exercise helped identify weaknesses and gave its security teams practical experience that now feeds into the commercial service.

SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said, “We want to create a system where we will be able to ‌defend ⁠critical Japanese infrastructure,”

“We want to leverage the new weapon of OpenAI to defend, we ⁠see this as our obligation,” Son added.

Junichi Miyakawa, president and CEO of SoftBank Corp, said the company would apply lessons from its internal testing to external clients.

“Leveraging the practical expertise we’ve acquired through our use of OpenAI’s cybersecurity technologies, we’ll confront the increasingly sophisticated cyber threats targeting Japan’s critical infrastructure.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “AI is transforming cybersecurity, and we’re focused on building durable programs that help it accelerate defenders. We’re excited to work with SoftBank to deliver the transformational benefits of our cyber models to more organisations in Japan and strengthen the systems all of us rely on.”

SoftBank said the cybersecurity service combines the models of OpenAI with its own operational experience in managing large-scale telecom and enterprise systems. It believes this mix will help organisations move from detection to action more quickly, rather than reacting after breaches occur.

The rollout will start with a small team of around 50 people working on deployment and support. That figure is expected to grow to about 1,000 as demand increases and the service expands across more sectors in Japan.

The post SoftBank Launches OpenAI-Built Cybersecurity Service to Detect, Fix System Weaknesses Before Exploits appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

With this collaboration, Red Hat and SoftBank are addressing many of the long-standing RAN implementation challenges that service providers often face, such as balancing user demands with energy costs, resource availability and managing deterministic and distributed workloads.

By bringing together AI and RAN on a common platform, Red Hat OpenShift, service providers can dynamically adjust network parameters to meet changing demand and streamline network operations for higher agility.

SoftBank is working with Red Hat to develop AITRAS – an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift.

AITRAS provides an enhanced network orchestration and optimisation solution that can support virtualised RAN and AI-enabled applications alike, enabling service providers to operate diverse applications with greater consistency and flexibility.

Additionally, SoftBank is working with Red Hat to use community-driven technologies, like Kepler, an open source project founded by Red Hat, to help service providers reduce energy costs by more accurately capturing and acting upon power-use metrics from applications.

The power monitoring capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift are derived from Kepler, which exposes key metrics at the cluster level to probe key performance counters and other system statistics.

These metrics can then be fed into SoftBank’s AITRAS orchestrator to help even out power consumption across disparate sites and optimise energy.

Using Red Hat OpenShift and its power monitoring capabilities, AITRAS can help service providers to:

• Optimise the placement of compute- and GPU-intensive workloads according to power consumption metrics to maximise energy usage across disparate environments, while still maintaining enhanced performance.

• Enable lightweight measuring using Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, via extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) for kernel-level data collection, to help reduce overhead and improve energy efficiency.

• Achieve more precise GPU energy calculations for both Linux processes and Kubernetes pods using enhanced observability capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, enabling service providers to pinpoint granularities across multi-instance GPU (MIG) and various GPU devices.
To learn more about SoftBank’s AI-RAN solution on Red Hat OpenShift and the benefits of Kepler, visit Red Hat at MWC Barcelona 2025 (booth 2F30) for a demonstration.

Commenting, Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Global Engineering, Red Hat, said,

“Red Hat and SoftBank are committed to supporting the future of 5G and 6G use cases by bringing the combined power of AI and RAN to network orchestration and optimisation. With Red Hat OpenShift as a common platform, AI-RAN offers a pioneering approach to network operations for service providers to harness AI for improved resource efficiency and more sustainable power consumption, as well as supporting AI-enabled workloads across network environments.”

Ryuji Wakikawa, vice president, Head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology, SoftBank Corp., also said:

“Electricity and telecommunications services continue to grow as critical infrastructure that supports society. By monitoring and predicting power consumption, ‘AITRAS’ optimises equipment from an energy efficiency perspective while reducing risks through distributed deployment. The integration of telecommunications and power infrastructure paves the way for the future of AI-driven infrastructure.”

The post Red Hat and SoftBank Implement AI-RAN to Optimise Network Performance and Sustainability appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.