Outtake slashes takedown times from 60 days to hours using OpenAI

Enterprise security teams are drowning in alerts, and the old way—throwing third-party contractors at manual content review—is too slow, inconsistent, and expensive to keep up. Outtake is taking a fundamentally different swing at the problem. The company has built always-on AI agents, powered by GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, and OpenAI o3, that can scan millions of surface areas per minute, from app store listings to social media ads, and map out networks of trustworthy and suspicious entities.

“Security threats now mutate every hour, and OpenAI’s models make it possible for our defense to move just as fast,” says Alex Dhillon, Outtake’s Founder and CEO. That speed isn’t just marketing talk. The company has compressed takedown timelines from a sluggish 60 days down to just a few hours, saving enterprise customers millions in potential fraud losses. The system works by letting customers train agents using natural language to define whitelists, brand guidelines, and enforcement policies. Once deployed, the agents crawl the open web continuously. GPT-4.1 handles the heavy lifting of multimodal detection, surfacing threats buried inside screenshots or video. It then classifies the abuse type—phishing, impersonation, copyright violations—and scores the severity.

Where the system gets clever is in how it connects dots. OpenAI o3 is used for higher-order reasoning, linking a spoofed domain to a lookalike app and a fake social account to reveal a coordinated abuse campaign. That’s the kind of multi-step investigative work that would take a human team days. Outtake’s agents can then automatically compile evidence and file resolution notices through function calling, generating outputs that are auditable and meet the compliance requirements of each platform. Crucially, humans stay in the loop for edge cases and can override decisions, with feedback incorporated in real time without retraining the models.

Dhillon is blunt about why they’re betting on OpenAI rather than cheaper alternatives. “We’ve built an in-house system to evaluate new models against cybersecurity-specific KPIs,” he says. “Consistently, none come close to the reliability we get from OpenAI at current price points, especially when the agent has to reason through convoluted, multimodal signals.” That reasoning across disparate surface areas is what makes the product viable. Outtake is now building toward extending its defense system to strengthen identity verification across customer networks, a move that suggests the company sees agentic AI not just as a cleanup crew for the internet, but as the foundation for a more fundamentally trustworthy digital landscape.