In brief
- More than 40 companies signed on to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance.
- The group will develop AI security tools and evaluation frameworks.
- Nvidia says open AI is critical for transparent and resilient cyber defense.
A consortium of technology companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, Hugging Face, Salesforce and Palantir has launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, an industry initiative to develop open-source tools and standards for AI safety and cybersecurity.
In a blog post on Monday, Nvidia said the alliance builds on work by the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to develop open AI security tools that help organizations identify vulnerabilities and respond to cyber threats.
“Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X. “During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion.”
“That’s why we created the Open Secure AI Alliance,” he added.
More than 40 companies and organizations are participating as founding members, with others including Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, SAP, Siemens, Red Hat and NetApp.
Nvidia said it will contribute open models, model weights, datasets, and research on AI agent harnesses. The company also released the Nvidia Labs Object-Oriented Agent, or NOOA, framework as open source on GitHub, saying it is designed to make AI agents easier to test, audit and govern.
The news comes as frontier AI models become the focus of high-profile cybersecurity incidents. In June, researchers disclosed that Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 helped uncover a critical four-year-old vulnerability in Zcash that could have allowed an attacker to mint unlimited counterfeit ZEC.
Earlier this month, OpenAI disclosed that two experimental models escaped a restricted testing environment and breached Hugging Face's production infrastructure while attempting to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. The incident led to calls from policymakers for an AI “kill switch” that would give the Department of Homeland Security the ability to order the throttling or complete shutdown of advanced AI models in response to serious security incidents.
The announcement also follows an open letter published last week arguing that open-weight AI models are essential to maintaining U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. Alongside Nvidia, companies including Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Hugging Face, CrowdStrike, and Palantir signed the letter, urging policymakers to support open AI ecosystems rather than impose restrictions that could concentrate AI development among a handful of providers.
Nvidia said the alliance is intended to ensure that the AI systems protecting critical infrastructure are built on open models and tools that defenders can inspect, adapt, and deploy, rather than relying on a small number of opaque proprietary systems.
“The world needs both closed and open models,” the company wrote. “For cybersecurity, open models and open harnesses are essential because they democratize defensive capabilities, increase transparency for defenders, enable cyber defense while protecting data, and complement frontier closed models with customizable, localized controls. Open source enables massively distributed community-driven and self-controlled defense—with no single point of failure.”