NVIDIA said the Open Secure AI Alliance will work to strengthen cybersecurity through open models, harnesses, and tools that defenders can study, adapt, and deploy. The alliance builds on the Linux Foundation’s Akrites initiative and OpenSSF community work, with a focus on remediating and disclosing vulnerabilities using open technologies.

The NVIDIA blog post points to the recent Hugging Face security incident as an example of why defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense. During the incident, closed AI tools blocked essential forensic analysis because they could not distinguish attackers from defenders, according to the blog post.

Hugging Face Incident Shows Role of Open AI

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. NVIDIA said the incident showed that when defenders cannot inspect, adapt, and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained when speed matters most.

The Open Secure AI Alliance includes inaugural partners across cloud computing, cybersecurity, enterprise software, open source foundations, and AI research. The list includes NVIDIA, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell Technologies, HPE, Hugging Face, LangChain, the Linux Foundation, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens, Snowflake, and others.

Open Tools for Agent Security

NVIDIA said AI safety and security depend on the full agent stack, including identity, permissions, harnesses, guardrails, logs, and evaluation. The blog post argues that the debate should not focus only on whether model weights are open or closed because AI agents are complex systems made up of models, harnesses, and controls.

NVIDIA is contributing open models, model weights, data, and new agent harness research to the alliance. It has also made the open-source NVIDIA Labs Object-Oriented Agent project available on GitHub to help agent harnesses test, trace, audit, and govern agent behavior.

Why It Matters

The alliance’s contributors are working on different parts of an open defense stack for agents. HPE contributes to SPIFFE/SPIRE, which provides standards and tools for zero-trust identity; Hugging Face has offered Safetensors to the PyTorch Foundation; IBM and Red Hat’s Lightwell extends security across the open-source supply chain with digitally signed patches; and Microsoft’s MDASH multi-model agentic scanning harness uses specialized AI agents to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs.

The NVIDIA blog post calls on policymakers and regulators to recognize open models, harnesses, and security tooling as defensive assets in AI and cybersecurity policy. It says blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence, and vulnerability in a few closed providers.