More than 30 companies form open-source AI alliance

A slew of major technology companies announced Monday that they have joined together to advocate for the continued development and availability of open-source artificial intelligence models.

The Open Secure AI Alliance, spearheaded by NVIDIA, consists of 37 hardware and software companies supporting the continued need for and access to open source AI models. The alliance’s primary argument is that open source AI benefits cybersecurity, enables users to customize model controls and comes with no vulnerable single point of failure.

“Just as open source created a shared foundation for software, the United States and its partners now face a choice in AI security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models, harnesses and tools that any defender can study, adapt and deploy,” according to a blog post announcing the alliance’s creation. 

Members of the Open Secure AI Alliance say open source is needed now more than ever. The post references last week’s incident—in which OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5.6 broke from its container environment during internal testing and hacked into Hugging Face’s data infrastructure—as evidence of a clear need for continued access to open source models for security support.

The blog post noted that Hugging Face ran a popular open source model, GLM 5.2, on its networks to contain the breach.

“That incident showed a practical truth: when defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most,” the post said. “Companies and countries need open frontier defensive tools and techniques so critical industries can build security systems across a multi-vendor ecosystem and avoid single points of failure.”

Two major closed-source AI developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, were not among those listed as part of the alliance. While OpenAI does offer some open-source products, Anthropic does not. 

Goals for alliance members include creating and maintaining an open defense stack for AI agents, with different companies offering their distinct open-source products. Coinciding with the blog post, NVIDIA unveiled its Labs Object-Oriented Agents, a repository of agents built on Python code.

The future of the open-source model ecosystem in the U.S. has recently become a political lightning rod. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios on Wednesday accused Chinese AI model developer Moonshot AI of illicitly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model, a process in which an AI learns and copies the inner workings of a more mature and complex model.

Other Trump administration leaders, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, clarified that the administration supports an open-source model ecosystem, but that “open source is not open season on American IP.”

The announcement of the alliance also included a call for policymakers to support a robust open-source environment. 

“As policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety, it will be crucial to recognize open models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities, in AI and cybersecurity policy,” the post said. “Blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence and vulnerability in a few closed providers.”