NVIDIA and a group of tech companies have formed an alliance to promote the use of open AI models in cybersecurity, days after OpenAI disclosed that one of its own AI models breached Hugging Face’s systems during an internal security evaluation.
The new group, called the Open Secure AI Alliance, builds on work already underway at the Linux Foundation’s Akrites initiative and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).
“Open models, like any powerful technology, can be misused — including through attempts to weaken safeguards or repurpose capabilities for cyber attacks — but those risks are not unique to open systems, and they must be managed wherever advanced AI is deployed,” Nvidia said in a statement.
Among the 27 founding members are Microsoft, Dell Technologies, the Linux Foundation, and NVIDIA itself, alongside companies including Cisco, CrowdStrike, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and Hugging Face.
(Source: NVIDIA)
The Hugging Face incident
“The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear reminder: cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense,” Nvidia wrote.
“When closed AI tools — unable to distinguish attackers from defenders — blocked essential forensic analysis, 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,” the company added.
Hugging Face disclosed the incident on July 16, noting it had identified unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials earlier that same week.
The company traced the entry point to a malicious dataset that abused two code-execution paths in its data processing pipeline. That allowed an intruder to execute code on a processing worker, escalate privileges, and move into several internal clusters. At the time, Hugging Face attributed the campaign to an autonomous agent framework of unknown origin.
Last week, OpenAI confirmed the incident was caused by its own AI models during an internal evaluation of their exploitation capabilities.
“That incident showed a practical truth: 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,” Nvidia noted.
A message to regulators
The alliance argues that AI security should not depend on a handful of closed systems. Instead, it wants defenders, including companies and governments protecting their own infrastructure, to have access to open models, agent frameworks, and tools they can inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure.
“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,” Nvidia concluded.