# OpenWALDO launches to build collaborative community for open-source AI > Source: > Published: 2026-08-11 16:00:22+00:00 ### OpenWALDO launches to build collaborative community for open-source AI [OpenWALDO](https://openwaldo.org/), a new open-source artificial intelligence project sponsored by Ctrl IQ Inc., launched today, led by Gregory Kutzer, the founder of Rocky Linux, CentOS and Apptainer. The project aims to build a community-led, open-source-governed corpus of AI training data. It will provide a space similar to Hugging Face Inc., which primarily distributes open-weight models, where every builder can innovate a shared foundation of information instead of duplicating their own. Open-weight models are powerful because they allow users to download and run AI models anywhere. This has been an extremely valuable milestone, opening up models that can run on consumer hardware or in the cloud without the need for specialized proprietary hardware or hidden within the proprietary depths of centralized corporations. However, open-weight models lack something important: They ship without the code, methods, recipes and training data needed to regenerate them. That’s where open-source models come in. “I’ve spent my career watching open-source turn users into builders, competitors into collaborators, and shared problems into common infrastructure that operates at massive scale,” Kurtzer said. “No single organization could build or sustain all of that alone. OpenWALDO brings that proven model to AI. OpenWALDO proposes an AI Bill of Materials that adds not just open weights, but also open source, which includes full training data. This includes the object references, documents, tokens, inventory and licenses as evidence of the content needed to rebuild the canonical model from the ground up. According to the project, this means every assertion is attributed, rewritable and correctable in public. That means everything is in the open and any open model can be reviewed to see if there is any copyrighted or “[copyleft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft)” content that might taint the source or make anyone using it legally responsible for its outputs once it is fully trained. This is the essential: “Know before you train.” It’s a step above open weights. Kurtzer and OpenWALDO saw that the current industry has led to a culture where many AI teams assemble their foundation training material from scratch, scraping together recipes piecewise and duplicating work across the globe. It doesn’t need to work this way. The objective of the project is to provide a community-built resource that will help archive best practices and build on them with verified baselines of what works, allow experimentation in public, and build, ship and reveal auditable lines that can be evaluated collectively. The project will be available to anyone: individuals, hobbyists, researchers, institutions and corporations. The objective is to let everyone learn together, build on this public foundation for the public good and create a durable AI commons. “Open source has won this argument before,” Kurtzer added. “Proprietary vendors made identical claims about open code: insecure, unaccountable, impossible to trust. They lost, because source, licenses and provenance made trust apparent.” Just like the broader open-source commons, the idea is to provide a space for the AI open source to improve, learn and build. “Let’s work together, build its foundation in the open, and collaboratively take AI to the next level,” Kurtzer said. ##### Image: [ShutterStock/Production Perig](https://www.shutterstock.com/g/productionperig) # A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. **Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network**, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. **15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos**, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more** 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni**— Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. # Are you AWS customer? 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