IBM and Red Hat want to become the ‘security clearinghouse’ for open source applications in the enterprise

IBM and Red Hat want to become the ‘security clearinghouse’ for open source applications in the enterprise

By Taryn Plumb
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 04:33:00

Announced today, the project will commit $5 billion and 20,000 IBM and Red Hat engineers to build a new ‘enterprise clearinghouse’ to accelerate discovery and remediation of vulnerabilities in open source software. The companies say the clearinghouse will serve as an AI-powered  “security coordination layer,” giving enterprises the ability to integrate patches directly into their existing software supply chains.

Now in the design phase with a group of 11 financial partners, Project Lightwell will eventually be offered as a commercial subscription.

“The advancement in AI tools has broken the patching map, which is the ability to discover vulnerabilities in software without losing the speed of remediation,” Ashesh Badani, Red Hat SVP and CPO, told CSOonline. “Everyone’s running open source software, and the challenge is not being able to fix vulnerabilities quickly enough.”

Open source security issues have been well documented: Almost…