Tech industry leaders join to form Open Secure AI Alliance to promote safety and security
Nvidia Corp. today announced the launch of the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new organization founded by technology, cloud computing and cybersecurity leaders to build and share open artificial intelligence tools.
As the capability and strength of AI tools grows and shapes the technology industry, it is becoming instrumental for safety, security and trust to remediate and secure vulnerabilities within this emerging software. The company said just as open source created a shared foundation for software, AI security now faces an equally important critical mass where too much of the infrastructure is closed, opaque and difficult to tap into by the larger community.
A who’s who of leaders from cloud computing, cybersecurity, enterprise software, open-source foundations and AI research joined the inaugural launch of OSAA. In addition to Nvidia, founding partners included Adobe Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Cloudera Inc., Cloudflare Inc., Databricks Inc., Hugging Face Inc., OpenClaw, IBM Corp., Red Hat, Salesforce Inc., Snowflake Inc. and Thinking Machines Lab Inc., among almost two dozen more.
The mission of the OSAA is to ensure that defenders have access to open, frontier tools that they can trust and control.
This alliance forms even as the industry struggles to handle the emerging use of AI as both cybersecurity tools for defense and attack. AI agents, autonomous software capable of operating on its own with little or no human oversight, are becoming a mainstay of cybersecurity operations. This happens even as the enterprise continues to infuse AI into every layer of the technology stack, from building code and debugging to maintenance, operations and customer-facing interfaces and websites.
Recently, Hugging Face, the open-source AI model and tool repository, suffered a breach from a then-unknown attacker and attempted to use current centralized closed-source frontier AI tools to defend itself – however, safeguards on these models blocked it from doing the necessary analysis. As a result, the company pivoted to the open-source Z.ai GLM 5.2 to develop a rapid response and repel the attack.
A week later, OpenAI Group PBC revealed that one of its own frontier models running agentic capabilities had escaped containment and hacked into Hugging Face while under testing and evaluation. This made headlines primarily because it is the first example of a frontier model reaching out of its own sandbox and executing a cyberattack on its own.
This is not the first time AI models, including frontier models, have been used by cyberattackers to enhance and execute attacks. Autonomous software driven by powerful AI models can adapt and react faster than humans, orchestrate and control wide varieties of tools using large datasets of vulnerabilities and exploits to determine critical paths to attack networks. Already, a growing number of cyberattacks are AI-assisted or driven, with 87% of organizations reporting experiencing AI-related attacks in the past year, according to AllAboutAI.
AI tools are not only becoming a mainstay of defense; the software itself is becoming a new vulnerable surface that must be secured against attackers. As the industry evolves, Nvidia and the new alliance argue that AI safety will require using the full agent stack – identity, permissions, harnesses, guardrails, logs and evaluation – to understand and respond to emerging threats. Open harnesses, tools and other elements will matter just as much as open models when equipping defenders with the ability to customize and control their capacity to inspect, test, improve and share knowledge.
Alliance membership brings open tools to the defense
Nvidia is contributing open models, model weights, and new agent harness research to the OSAA with the intent of seeding the future development of cybersecurity tools and techniques.
This includes the new open-source Nvidia Labs Object-Oriented Agent project, now available on GitHub, which enables the development of advanced AI safety capabilities for agentic control systems. Research from this project is building frameworks to enable harnesses to better integrate with models and control agent behavior for testing, auditing, tracing and responding to cyberattacks.
Other alliance members are also offering open tools, including HPE contributing the zero-trust identity framework SPIFFE/SPIRE; Hugging Face offering Safetensors, a safe format for storing and sharing model weights; and Microsoft contributing MDASH, a multi-model agnostic scanning harness designed to orchestrate AI agents to discover, debate and dissect exploitable bugs.
The new alliance of industry leaders and heavyweights will also work to educate and inform policymakers and regulators about the state of AI security. In the announcement, Nvidia noted that it will be crucial to understand the necessity of open models, harnesses and security.
This comes in the wake of the United States Treasury threatening to sanction open-weight Chinese AI model makers and pressure to curtail or ban the use of open-source tools. Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Meta Platforms Inc. and more than a dozen other tech firms penned an open letter last week calling upon policymakers to take care in regulating open-source models and avoid banning them outright. The letter argued that such a move could have a significantly negative effect on the industry.
For example, open-weight models and open tools promote community ecosystems for sharing, creating and evolving technology – a critical element of innovation that could be stifled if open-source model and tool access was curtailed. Open-weight models also allow companies to readily customize and run AI on their own infrastructure, allowing them greater control over sensitive data and computation.
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