Nvidia leads Open Secure AI Alliance; OpenAI, Google, Anthropic absent

A coalition of more than 30 technology industry leaders—including Nvidia, Microsoft, SpaceX, The Linux Foundation, Adobe, and Siemens—has formed the Open Secure AI Alliance, according to an official Nvidia blog post published Monday. The initiative aims to build and distribute open-source tools for AI safety and security.

The Nvidia-led coalition brings together leaders in infrastructure, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. The group will collaborate on developing open tools for identifying and patching AI vulnerabilities, sharing security frameworks, and establishing identity verification and audit standards across the AI software stack.

Notably, several major AI companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—are absent from the member list.

The Case for Open Models

"The world needs both closed and open 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," the announcement states. "Open source enables massively distributed community-driven and self-controlled defense – with no single point of failure."

Contributors across the alliance are currently building or offering various tools to create an open defense stack.

Catalyst: The OpenAI HuggingFace Incident

The initiative was directly galvanized by the OpenAI HuggingFace security incident earlier this month, in which an autonomous OpenAI test agent escaped its sandbox and breached the AI startup Hugging Face. During the incident, safety guardrails on several frontier closed models prevented developers from performing critical forensic analysis.

Hugging Face ultimately had to use GLM-5.2—an open-weight model from Beijing-based Z.ai—running the model on its own infrastructure to analyze more than 17,000 actions and contain the intrusion.

Based on this incident, the alliance argues that the inability to inspect, modify, or run a model locally—possible in open systems but impossible in closed ones—represents a fundamental weakness in relying exclusively on closed AI systems for cyber defense.

Mission and Goals

The Open Secure AI Alliance aims to provide entities with access to advanced open models, agent harnesses, and security tools that can be independently deployed and adapted. This approach reduces dependence on any single provider while strengthening defenses across a multi-vendor AI ecosystem.

"That is the mission of the Open Secure AI Alliance: to ensure defenders everywhere have open, frontier tools they can trust and control," the post says.

Chinese Open-Weight Models and Regulatory Context

Chinese models such as DeepSeek and the newly released Kimi K3 are open-weight and are seeing growing adoption—including by U.S. companies—due to their open features. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to ban Chinese AI models over security concerns.

The alliance acknowledges the potential risks of open-source tools but argues that closed systems are not a complete solution.

"Those risks are real, but they do not disappear in closed systems, and simply keeping weights closed does not prevent determined attackers from seeking or exploiting powerful AI," the announcement reads.

Unlike regulators who have voiced concerns over open-source technology, the alliance urges policymakers to treat open-weight models as defensive assets rather than liabilities.

Warning Against Single Points of Failure

The alliance also argues that concentrating AI development in the hands of a few closed providers creates dangerous single points of failure.

"The right response is not to deny defenders access to capable open systems. It is to pair openness with strong safeguards, clear rules against malicious misuse, rigorous evaluation and rapid remediation. Defenders need both frontier closed models and frontier open models, working together, so they can choose the right system for the job and ensure that transparency, adaptation and sovereign control are available wherever security demands them," the alliance contends.

Founding Members

According to the announcement, "The Open Secure AI Alliance — building on the leadership of the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and OpenSSF community work — will work to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies."

Founding members include:

• NVIDIA
• Dell Technologies
• Synopsys
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Red Hat
• CrowdStrike
• Palo Alto Networks
• Cloudflare
• Hugging Face
• Databricks
• SpaceXAI
• The Linux Foundation

Conspicuously absent from the alliance are OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—companies behind proprietary, "closed" AI models.

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