NVIDIA and a coalition of major technology companies launched a new artificial intelligence safety initiative on Monday, with a primary focus on open models. This development comes as the fallout continues from a cyberattack orchestrated by an unconstrained OpenAI model.

Last week, it was reported that the target of the attack, the startup Hugging Face, was unable to defend itself using leading US frontier models. This was because their safety guardrails failed to differentiate between an attacker and a defender. Consequently, Hugging Face turned to a self-hosted, open-weight Chinese model, which was not subject to the same restrictions.

As US lawmakers increasingly weigh how to curb the growing prevalence of Chinese AI models—the most advanced of which are open-weight—tech giants have launched an initiative aimed at building and sharing open AI tools. Open models can be downloaded, modified, and self-hosted, in stark contrast to closed models, including frontier systems built by Anthropic and OpenAI, which are only accessible through specific infrastructure.

In a statement, NVIDIA said: "The Open Safety AI Alliance will be dedicated to using open technologies to fix and disclose vulnerabilities. The recent Hugging Face security incident provides a clear reminder: cyber defenders need open, frontier-level agent systems to defend themselves."

In addition to NVIDIA, other members of the alliance include Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and dozens of other technology companies from the US and Europe. NVIDIA stated that the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident revealed a "reality": "When defenders cannot inspect, tune, and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at the very moment when speed is critical."