NVIDIA and a broad coalition of technology companies have come together to create the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new organization focused on building and sharing open tools that promote the responsible use of and trust in artificial intelligence.
The alliance builds on the work of the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and the OpenSSF community. Its mission is to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies, recognizing that open source software is a critical pillar of the global economy, underpinning cloud computing, financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, government, and internet services.
The Case for Open AI in Cybersecurity
The alliance argues that the world needs both closed and open AI models. 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.
While open models can be misused, including through attempts to weaken safeguards or repurpose capabilities for cyber attacks, the alliance states that those risks are not unique to open systems and must be managed wherever advanced AI is deployed.
A recent security incident at Hugging Face served as a practical example. When closed AI tools blocked essential forensic analysis because they could not distinguish attackers from defenders, Hugging Face ran the open-weight GLM 5.2 model on its own infrastructure to analyze more than 17,000 actions and contain the intrusion. That incident demonstrated that when defenders cannot inspect, adapt, and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most.
Founding Members and Partners
The Open Secure AI Alliance includes a wide range of leaders across cloud computing, cybersecurity, enterprise software, open source foundations, and AI research. Inaugural partners include NVIDIA, Adobe, Cadence, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudera, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Elastic, HPE, Hugging Face, IBM, LangChain, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NAVER, NetApp, Nous Research, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Reflection AI, Salesforce, SAP, SK Telecom, ServiceNow, Siemens, Snowflake, SpaceXAI, Synopsys, Thinking Machines Lab, and TrendAI.
Addressing Concerns About Open Models
Some argue that open models are inherently less safe because they can be misused for cyberattacks or modified to remove guardrails. The alliance acknowledges those risks are real but notes they do not disappear in closed systems. Simply keeping weights closed does not prevent determined attackers from seeking or exploiting powerful AI.
The alliance believes the right response is not to deny defenders access to capable open systems. Instead, it is to pair openness with strong safeguards, clear rules against malicious misuse, rigorous evaluation, and rapid remediation. In cybersecurity, the safer path is the one that gives more defenders the ability to test, verify, and strengthen the systems on which society relies.
Open Research Contributions
An AI agent is a complex system built from models, harnesses, and guardrails. Real AI safety and security depend on the full agent stack, including identity, permissions, harnesses, guardrails, logs, and evaluation, not just on whether model weights are open or closed. Open harnesses and tools make those controls easier for many defenders to inspect, test, and improve.
NVIDIA is contributing open models, model weights, data, and new agent harness research to the alliance. The new open source NVIDIA Labs Object-Oriented Agent (NOOA) project is now available on GitHub. It aims to make advanced AI safety capabilities more accessible for agent harnesses by enabling better integration with models to make agent behavior easier to test, trace, audit, and govern.
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Across the alliance, contributors are building an open defense stack for agents, covering identity and isolation, safe model formats, multi-model scanning, and secure coding workflows.
HPE contributes to SPIFFE/SPIRE, which creates zero-trust identity framework standards and methods that can cryptographically verify AI agents and services to ensure only authorized workloads communicate and access enterprise resources.
Hugging Face has offered Safetensors, a safe format to store AI model weights that provides transparency and guarantees of no remote code execution, to the PyTorch Foundation.
IBM and Red Hat's Lightwell extends security across the open source supply chain with digitally signed patches.
Microsoft's MDASH multi-model agentic scanning harness orchestrates specialized AI agents to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs.
A Call to Policymakers
The alliance calls on policymakers and regulators to recognize open models, harnesses, and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities, in AI and cybersecurity policy. Blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence, and vulnerability in a few closed providers.
Companies and governments should invest in shared open infrastructure for AI defense, including datasets, evaluation frameworks, attack simulators, and red-teaming tools, much as past generations invested in open source software.
The Future the Alliance Seeks
The age of AI agents can be one of resilience and shared security. With the right choices, open secure AI systems can give defenders the tools they need, strengthen competition, extend technological leadership, and ensure that the safety and security of this extraordinary technology are built in the open for everyone.
That future will not be secured by assuming that secrecy alone is safety. It will be secured by building systems that are strong enough to withstand scrutiny, flexible enough to be improved, and open enough to mobilize the full community of defenders.
The Open Secure AI Alliance invites governments, industry, and researchers to join in the work of defending the AI era together.
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