NVIDIA and more than 30 technology companies have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition that will develop and share open tools, models and techniques to safeguard software and AI agents. Announced on July 27, 2026, the alliance builds on prior work by the Linux Foundation’s Akrites initiative and the OpenSSF community, and it counts cloud, cybersecurity, enterprise software, open source foundations and AI research organizations among its inaugural partners.
What is the Open Secure AI Alliance?
The alliance is described as a movement to create open technologies, techniques and tools for protecting software and agents. It aims to give defenders open, frontier tools they can inspect, adapt and run on their own infrastructure, reducing dependence on a small number of closed providers.
Founding partners include NVIDIA, 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, ServiceNow, Siemens, SK Telecom, Snowflake, SpacexAI, Synopsys, Thinking Machines Lab and TrendAI.
Why open tools matter for AI security
The announcement frames a choice about how AI defenses will be built. Open source software already underpins cloud computing, financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, government and internet services, and the alliance argues that cybersecurity benefits from open development in particular. Open models and open harnesses let defenders study how systems work, run them inside their own environments, and customize controls locally.
The post draws on a recent incident at Hugging Face to make this point. When closed AI tools were unable to distinguish attackers from defenders and blocked forensic analysis, 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.
What NVIDIA is contributing
NVIDIA is contributing open models, model weights, data and new agent harness research to the alliance. A new open source project, the NVIDIA Labs Object-Oriented Agent (NOOA) framework, is now available on GitHub. NOOA is designed to help harnesses integrate with models so that agent behavior is easier to test, trace, audit and govern.
Contributions from other alliance members
Members are building components of an open defense stack for agents, covering identity, isolation, safe model formats, multi-model scanning and secure coding workflows.
- HPE contributes to SPIFFE and SPIRE, which define zero-trust identity standards that cryptographically verify AI agents and services.
- Hugging Face has contributed Safetensors, a format for storing AI model weights without remote code execution, to the PyTorch Foundation.
- IBM and Red Hat’s Lightwell extends supply chain security with digitally signed patches.
- Microsoft’s MDASH is a multi-model agentic scanning harness that orchestrates specialized AI agents to discover, debate and prove exploitable bugs.
- SpacexAI has open sourced the Grok Build terminal-based AI coding agent and plans to open source the weights of the Grok line of models.
Open models, risks and safeguards
The post acknowledges that open models, like any powerful technology, can be misused, including through attempts to weaken safeguards or repurpose capabilities for cyber attacks. It argues these risks are not unique to open systems and must be managed wherever advanced AI is deployed. The proposed response is to pair openness with strong safeguards, clear rules against malicious misuse, rigorous evaluation and rapid remediation, rather than restrict access for defenders.
A call to policymakers
The alliance is asking policymakers and regulators to treat open models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets in AI and cybersecurity policy. It warns that blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating dependence and vulnerability in a few closed providers. It recommends public and private investment in shared open infrastructure, including datasets, evaluation frameworks, attack simulators and red-teaming tools.
FAQ
What is the Open Secure AI Alliance?
The Open Secure AI Alliance is a coalition launched on July 27, 2026, that develops and shares open technologies, techniques and tools to safeguard software and AI agents. NVIDIA and more than 30 founding partners from cloud, cybersecurity, enterprise software, open source foundations and AI research are inaugural members.
Why are open models important for cybersecurity?
Open models and open harnesses let defenders study, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure. This enables distributed, community-driven defense without a single point of failure and allows local controls that complement closed frontier models.
What has NVIDIA released for the alliance?
NVIDIA has contributed open models, model weights, data and new agent harness research, and has released the NVIDIA Labs Object-Oriented Agent (NOOA) framework as open source on GitHub to help harnesses integrate with models and make agent behavior easier to test, trace, audit and govern.
This article summarizes reporting from blogs.nvidia.com. See our editorial disclaimer for how our articles are produced.
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