Nvidia has called on policymakers and business to support open artificial intelligence (AI) models to enable better cyber security.
It announced the industry-wide Open Secure AI just days after Microsoft’s open letter to US policymakers which described openness as “one of the most important paths to AI safety and security”.
In a blog post announcing the new initiative to drive open AI security, Nvidia said that companies and governments should invest in shared open infrastructure for AI defence – datasets, evaluation frameworks, attack simulators and red-teaming tools – similar to how past generations invested in open source software.
In the post, Nvidia said: “For cyber security, open models and open harnesses are essential because they democratise defensive capabilities, increase transparency for defenders, enable cyber defence while protecting data, and complement frontier closed models with customisable, localised controls. Open source enables massively distributed community-driven and self-controlled defence – with no single point of failure.”
The AI chipmaker has taken the decision to drive forward an industry alliance for open AI security, following the recent Hugging Face disclosure of a cyber attack that was driven from end-to-end by an autonomous AI agent system.
The advances in frontier AI models show that the tech sector is now in an arms race as advanced AI models continue to evolve.
Nvidia said the Hugging Face disclosure shows that cyber defence needs to be open, using frontier agentic systems: “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 analyse more than 17,000 actions and contain the intrusion.
“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 warned. It said companies and countries need open frontier defensive tools and techniques to enable critical industries to build security systems across an ecosystem comprising multiple technology providers to avoid single points of failure.
The inaugural members of the alliance are: 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.
OpenUK has called on the UK to deliver a home-grown equivalent to the Linux Foundation to promote open source technologies. Its CEO Amanda Brock, said: “The alliance is an appropriate step reinforcing Friday’s open letter message to US policy makers and governments by Microsoft.
“It’s great to see a collective response to the open source security challenge – we’ve been seeing enterprises respond to these issues individually of late, but it’s primarily a US industry response. It’s another example of the future soft power that exists around AI.
“For the UK (like other middle nations) if we want a place at the future dinner table for AI, we need to carve out our own place now. That means sharing and collaborating, but from assets based on intellectual property and collaboration on the technologies that we evolve in country and in our own foundation.”
