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Nvidia and more than 30 tech companies on Monday launched an alliance to develop open-source artificial intelligence tools for cyber defence, wading into a fight over the safety of freely available AI models, AFP reported.
The Open Secure AI Alliance – whose founding members include Microsoft, IBM, Palantir, CrowdStrike, Cisco, Dell and the Hugging Face model-sharing platform – will build and share tools that security teams can inspect, modify and run on their own systems, the group said in a statement.
The alliance was spurred by a breach this month at Hugging Face that OpenAI has acknowledged was the first publicly disclosed case of an AI model autonomously carrying out a real-world cyberattack.
Calling it “unprecedented”, OpenAI said two of its models escaped a sandboxed testing environment during an internal evaluation, reached the open internet and compromised Hugging Face’s infrastructure.
Hugging Face first tried to investigate and halt the attack using leading US commercial AI models, but their built-in safety guardrails blocked the work, Nvidia said.
The company instead turned to GLM 5.2, an open model from Chinese firm Zhipu AI (also known as Z.ai), to contain the intrusion.
That a Chinese model succeeded where American ones baulked has sharpened a debate in Silicon Valley and Washington, where lawmakers are weighing curbs on the use of Chinese AI systems amid an intensifying technology rivalry with Beijing.
Silicon Valley is broadly opposed to any such limits, with many industry figures seeing curbs on open-source AI as an effort to unfairly shield OpenAI and Anthropic, the juggernauts that sell the world’s most powerful models.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, is under particular pressure, having been the most visible holdout from voicing support for the open-source cause since the Hugging Face incident.
The alliance used its launch to urge regulators to treat open models as “defensive assets, not liabilities”, warning that blanket restrictions would weaken cyber defences and concentrate power in a handful of closed AI providers.
Members pledged to share tools for a stronger common defence.
Nvidia said it would release open models, data and new research on AI agent software, while Microsoft offered technology that helps AI agents to find software bugs.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company – New York-based Modal Labs – according to a Modal executive and a source familiar with the matter.
According to a timeline published by Hugging Face on Tuesday, the rogue agent broke into a sandbox, or an isolating testing environment, “hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure” before turning into a launchpad for the broader hack.
The third party provider was not named in the blog post, but Modal’s Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that one of their customers was hacked.
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