A new industry group led by Nvidia is promoting open AI models (and not OpenAI’s models) as essential to cyber defense.
OpenAI is noticeably absent from the list of initial supporters of a new industry initiative to promote the creation of strong, safe, defensive AI cybersecurity tools built on open-source platforms.
The Open Secure AI Alliance is an initiative of Nvidia with the backing of over 30 major AI makers and users, including Cisco, Databricks, Dell Technologies, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, OpenClaw, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens, Snowflake, and Thinking Machines.
One of the drivers for the group’s creation, Nvidia said, was the recent incident in which OpenAI allowed two of its most powerful closed-source AI models to hack Hugging Face, but Hugging Face was unable to use similar commercial models to analyze the attack to defend itself.
“The requests were blocked by the providers’ safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker,” Hugging Face wrote in its preliminary incident response report. “The attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried.”
Hugging Face didn’t know it at the time, but OpenAI had indeed removed safety restrictions from GPT-5.6 Sol and another more capable pre-release model in order to test their offensive cybersecurity abilities in what it thought was a contained environment.
With commercial AI models proving unsuitable for the defense, Hugging Face turned to open models. “We ran the forensic analysis instead on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model, on our own infrastructure,” it said. “The practical lesson for defenders: Have a capable model you can run on your own infrastructure vetted and ready before an incident, both to avoid guardrail lockout and to keep attacker data and credentials from leaving your environment.”
It’s that lesson that Nvidia and the other supporters of the Open Secure AI Alliance are hoping to apply, working to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies.
“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,” Nvidia wrote in a blog post about the new group.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to questions about whether it would join the Open Secure AI Alliance.