The three researchers who reached OpenAI's code are Indian, and this is not their first giant
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "The three researchers who reached OpenAI's code are Indian, and this is not their first giant")
The three researchers who reached OpenAI's code are Indian, and this is not their first giant
The team that used Claude to reach OpenAI's internal code is three Indian-origin security researchers — Harsh Jaiswal, Rahul Maini and Mohan Pedhapati — who co-founded the startup Hacktron AI in 2025. Between them they have years of finding serious flaws in the world's largest technology companies, including a paid disclosure to Apple worth $50,000.
Behind the headline that Claude was used to breach OpenAI is a smaller, more human story: the three people who did it, and the track record that made it possible.
They are Harsh Jaiswal, Rahul Maini and Mohan Pedhapati, three Indian-origin security researchers who co-founded a startup called Hacktron AI in 2025. Their own summary of themselves was modest — in effect, three people with ordinary AI subscriptions.
Who They Are
The modesty undersells a decade of work at the top of the field.
Harsh Jaiswal, known in the security community by the handle rootxharsh, has been a recognised name in bug-bounty hunting since the middle of the last decade. Rahul Maini has worked as a senior security researcher specialising in web vulnerabilities. Mohan Pedhapati has worked as a senior application-security auditor at an established security firm.
These are not hobbyists who got lucky with a chatbot. They are professionals who have spent years learning where large systems break.
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The Apple Precedent
The clearest measure of their pedigree predates this incident. Around January 2021, Jaiswal and Maini spent months examining Apple's infrastructure and found a misconfiguration that let them reach protected files without logging in, and ultimately run code on Apple's systems.
Apple paid them $50,000 for that disclosure — a figure that, set beside the $6,500 from OpenAI, says something about how bounty values vary by company and scope rather than by the seriousness of the access.
Why The Detail Matters
Naming the people matters because it corrects a tempting but wrong reading of this story.
The easy version is that AI has made hacking so simple that anyone can breach OpenAI. That is not what happened. Skilled researchers, who already knew how to find and chain vulnerabilities, used AI to do faster the specific part that is hardest and most time-consuming — writing a reliable exploit.
The expertise was still theirs. The judgement about where to look, what to chain, and when to stop was human. AI compressed the labour; it did not supply the knowledge. That is a more accurate and more useful lesson than 'anyone can do this,' and it is the one the researchers' own record demonstrates.
An Indian Presence At The Frontier
There is a straightforward point of national interest here too, and it is a positive one.
Indian researchers have been prominent in global bug-bounty and security work for years, often operating from India for companies and platforms based elsewhere. This incident is a high-profile example: a founder team of Indian origin, running their own company, doing work that sits at the leading edge of what AI-assisted security now looks like.
It is worth stating plainly what they did and did not do. They worked through OpenAI's official program, reported everything, and caused no harm — the definition of white-hat research. The story is a demonstration of skill applied responsibly, not of wrongdoing.
What To Watch
Whether Hacktron AI's approach — pairing experienced researchers with frontier models — becomes a template other security firms copy. Whether the visibility of Indian talent at this level translates into more of the industry being built in India rather than exported from it. And what the team publishes next, given that this disclosure was one result of broader research into the same class of image-processing flaws.
