- Nvidia and Microsoft lead the list of founders of the Open Secure AI Alliance
- AI, financial services, technology companies and other organizations developing AI services have joined the alliance
- Notable exceptions include OpenAI, Anthropic and Google
Nvidia has confirmed its membership of the new Open Secure AI Alliance, a collective of industry-leading technology, finance and AI companies working collaboratively to ensure openness in the AI industry. Curiously, while Microsoft and OpenClaw are among the founding members, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are not.
Inspired by the open source movement and the Linux Foundation-led Akrites AI initiative for cyber threat response, the Open Secure AI Alliance aims to use open technologies to reveal and remediate vulnerabilities.
Referring to the recent Hugging Face incident, where closed AI tools prevented full investigation of the event, the Open Secure AI Alliance’s founding announcement emphasizes the importance of open models and highlights how cybersecurity is one of the biggest benefits of open source software.
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A hug face answer?
A significant group of recognizable companies are involved in the Open Secure AI Alliance, including OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, IBM, the Linux Foundation, and Hugging Face.
Notable from this list are Google and Palantir, and of course OpenAI, which was responsible for the Hugging Face attack. Given that this incident occurred during a cybersecurity benchmark test, and OpenAI’s model conducted a fully automated attack on Hugging Face’s servers, it serves as an important demonstration of what is at risk from closed source models in the AI world.
“When defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond at precisely the moment when speed matters most,” states the Open Secure AI Alliance, which emphasizes its mission: “to ensure that defenders everywhere have open border tools they can trust and control.”
OpenAI’s lack of transparency in handling the incident and Hugging Face’s initial difficulty analyzing the intrusion due to closed source models really underscore the importance of this new alliance.
Open vs. closed
The argument about open and closed software models isn’t likely to end anytime soon, but the Open Secure AI Alliance certainly makes a strong case for open models. Yes, they can be a risk that can be changed or abused, but those risks exist in closed systems.
So the alliance’s view is to give defenders the tools to deal with threats rather than block those tools. After all, decades of cybersecurity research have shown that the best option is collaboration and testing—or, as the Open Secure AI Alliance says, “the safer path is one that empowers multiple defenders to test, verify, and strengthen the systems society depends on.”
Given OpenAI’s role in the Hugging Face incident, its absence makes sense—but what about Google and Anthropic? At a time when corporate collaboration is driving the development of new technologies within tight standards (for example, the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s work with Matter and Aliro), the Open Secure AI Alliance seems to have the right idea.
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