Chainguard Surpasses 1 Billion Container Build Manifests, Doubling Growth in Six Months

The company's build velocity is accelerating faster than ever, with its container image catalog reaching more than 3,000 unique container images and 675,000 image variants

KIRKLAND, Wash., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Chainguard, the trusted source for open source, today announced it has surpassed 1 billion unique container build manifests, the artifacts generated every time a new image in its catalog is built, updated, or patched. With this news, the company has doubled its total build volume from 500 million in just six months. Chainguard has also reached 3,000 unique container images in the Chainguard Containers catalog, adding 1,000 additional images in the same timeframe. Together, these milestones demonstrate the company's engineering rigor and the impact of its automated software factory, built specifically to accelerate output over time, at a moment when AI is redefining the speed of software supply chain attacks.

Keeping pace with AI-accelerated attacks 
It used to take a human attacker days or weeks to find a vulnerability and build a working exploit. AI has collapsed that timeline and can scan source code and dependencies, chain vulnerabilities together, and weaponize them into new, complex exploits in just hours, often before a fix for specific vulnerabilities reaches the public. As that window continues to collapse, and the time attackers need approaches zero, the only solution is to prevent attacks in the first place. The only durable defense is to remove all exposure by using open source software that is secure by design so it proactively defends against threats at every layer of the open source software supply chain.

"The gap between a disclosed vulnerability and a working exploit keeps shrinking, and closing that gap takes two things most vendors can't offer together. You need a catalog broad enough to cover virtually every artifact an organization relies on, and the underlying speed to keep every image in that catalog up-to-date," said Matt Moore, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Chainguard. "Reaching 1 billion build manifests and doubling our output in just six months is a signal of both. The only way to stay ahead of attackers is to fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. That's what the Chainguard Factory is built to do, at a pace we're constantly accelerating."

Chainguard Factory: the engine behind the acceleration
Doubling from 500 million to 1 billion build manifests in six months is the result of a fundamentally faster software factory. Earlier this year, Chainguard introduced Chainguard Factory 2.0, powered by DriftlessAF, a resilient, self-correcting build system that pairs traditional automation with agentic, AI-powered reconciliation bots. Where the original Chainguard Factory automated the mechanics of rebuilding open source software, Factory 2.0 operates at the speed of AI attacks: detecting drift, resolving dependency conflicts, and correcting itself in real time.

Through the Chainguard Factory, the company has now delivered:

• 1 billion+ build manifests: Chainguard has produced more than 500 million build manifests in the past six months alone. Build manifests reflect initial project builds, rebuilds from dependency updates and tooling changes, builds triggered by vulnerabilities, generated SBOMs and signatures, customer-produced custom images through Custom Assembly, and more.
• 3,000+ unique container images: The Chainguard Containers catalog now features more than 3,000 images for which a minimal, low- or zero-CVE Chainguard image is available, including widely used applications, runtimes, and frameworks like go, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Python, Java, and many more. In just the past six months, the company added 1,000 new projects to the catalog.
• 675,000+ image variants: With hundreds of thousands of architecture-specific image variants across its catalog, Chainguard delivers broad platform coverage and rapid availability of new versions and persistent availability of historical versions as upstream projects and architectures evolve.
• 32,000+ unique Chainguard OS packages: By providing customers with thousands of underlying OS packages and hundreds of thousands of package versions,  Chainguard Factory assembles the building blocks that organizations need to customize their container images from Chainguard.

To date, Chainguard has eliminated 2 million CVEs across all of its customers. These are vulnerabilities that never had the chance to become incidents because they were resolved before the image shipped. Every new project, rebuild, and patch produced by Factory 2.0 shrinks the window an attacker has to work with. The faster Chainguard's software factory moves, the more open source software it secures, preventing even more risk for customers.

"The depth of what Chainguard has built — and continues to improve — would take years and a very experienced team of experts to replicate," said Maha Alsayasneh, Senior Engineering Manager, Elastic. "Partnering with Chainguard has let our engineers spend their time on the problems only we can solve, instead of chasing CVEs across our stack."

Explore Chainguard's container image catalog and learn more about working with Chainguard.

About Chainguard 
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By providing engineers and AI agents with hardened, trusted, and production-ready artifacts, Chainguard helps organizations prevent AI supply chain attacks, increase engineering velocity while reducing toil, and maintain continuous compliance. Customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, DocuSign, OpenAI, Public Storage, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.  For more information, visit: https://www.chainguard.dev/ 

Contact: Brittany Hendrickson, [email protected] 

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SOURCE Chainguard