Athena is an industry coalition, launched by Chainguard, that pools vulnerability findings from member organizations across the software industry and turns them into fixes and mitigations before attackers can exploit them.

Many of the vulnerabilities AI models surface are what Chainguard calls silent vulnerabilities: bugs a maintainer already fixed, sometimes years ago, that never got a CVE and never triggered a scanner alert. AI models can find these faster than the industry's disclosure and patching processes were built to handle, and exploits can now be weaponized within hours or days of discovery, sometimes before a fix even exists.

Cloudsmith is a mitigation partner in Athena. We get access to the coalition's pre-disclosure vulnerability feed to patch and harden our own platform before exploits go public. We enrich our dependency data with exploitation signals so the safe packages we surface to developers, AI agents, and pipelines reflect real-world risk. We send our own observed exploitation data back into Athena to help other partners respond faster. This is one part of a broader relationship: Cloudsmith customers can also proxy and cache Chainguard's hardened containers and libraries directly through Cloudsmith.

Athena's first disclosure covered 14 previously silent vulnerabilities in Java projects: one critical, one high, eight medium, and four low severity, none of them live zero-days. For each one, Chainguard published the patch, published a free public advisory, and shipped a remediated artifact.

Yes. Cloudsmith customers can proxy and cache Chainguard Containers and Chainguard Libraries directly through Cloudsmith. That makes hardened, low-to-no-CVE images and dependencies the default source for builds and pipelines, with Cloudsmith's policy enforcement and consumption traceability layered on top.