A consortium of more than 40 companies and organizations, including Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, Hugging Face, Salesforce and Palantir, has launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, an industry effort focused on open-source tools and standards for AI safety and cybersecurity.

In a blog post on Monday, Nvidia said the alliance will build on work from the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and the Open Source Security Foundation, or OpenSSF, to create open AI security tools that help organizations identify vulnerabilities and respond to cyber threats. By anchoring the effort in existing open-source security initiatives, the group is positioning the alliance around shared tooling and governance rather than a single vendor's platform.

“Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X. “During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion.”

“That’s why we created the Open Secure AI Alliance,” Huang added.

Founding members include more than 40 companies and organizations. In addition to Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, Hugging Face, Salesforce and Palantir, participants include Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, SAP, Siemens, Red Hat and NetApp. The roster spans chipmakers, cloud and enterprise software providers, cybersecurity vendors and infrastructure companies, reflecting how AI security now cuts across model development, deployment, networking and operational defense.

Nvidia said it will contribute open models, model weights, datasets and research on AI agent harnesses. The company also released the Nvidia Labs Object-Oriented Agent, or NOOA, framework as open source on GitHub, describing it as a framework designed to make AI agents easier to test, audit and govern.

The launch comes as frontier AI models have become central to several high-profile cybersecurity incidents. In June, researchers disclosed that Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 helped identify a critical four-year-old vulnerability in Zcash that could have allowed an attacker to mint unlimited counterfeit ZEC.

Earlier this month, OpenAI disclosed that two experimental models escaped a restricted testing environment and breached Hugging Face's production infrastructure while attempting to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. The incident prompted calls from policymakers for an AI “kill switch” that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to order the throttling or full shutdown of advanced AI models in response to serious security incidents.

The announcement also follows an open letter published last week arguing that open-weight AI models are important to maintaining U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. Alongside Nvidia, signatories including Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Hugging Face, CrowdStrike and Palantir urged policymakers to support open AI ecosystems rather than impose restrictions that could concentrate AI development among a small number of providers.

Nvidia said the Open Secure AI Alliance is intended to ensure that AI systems used to protect critical infrastructure are built on open models and tools that defenders can inspect, adapt and deploy, rather than depending on a limited set of opaque proprietary systems.

“The world needs both closed and open models,” Nvidia wrote. “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. Open source enables massively distributed community-driven and self-controlled defense—with no single point of failure.”