Tech companies create AI safety initiative after rogue bot cyberattack
by Joe Fisher · UPIJuly 27 (UPI) -- Dozens of tech companies are joining together to launch an AI safety initiative in response to last week's cyberattack involving rogue OpenAI models.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Cisco and Cloudflare are among the dozens of companies that are joining the Open Secure AI Alliance. The purpose of the coalition is to build and share open-weight AI tools to curb unsafe use of the technology and improve trust.
"The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear reminder: cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense," a press release from Nvidia said. "The incident shows 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."
Hugging Face, a tech startup, was the target of last week's cyberattack. Nvidia said the company's system was not able to defend itself because it could not differentiate the attacker from the defender.
Hugging Face then used an open-weight Chinese AI model that does not face the same restrictions as U.S. models.
Lawmakers are working to curb the use of Chinese AI models. The Open Secure AI Alliance is calling on lawmakers to recognize open models as "defensive assets, not liabilities" and to avoid "blanket restrictions" on open frontier AI systems.
"Companies and governments should invest in shared open infrastructure for AI defense -- datasets, evaluation frameworks, attack simulators and red-teaming tools -- much as past generations invested in open source software," Nvidia's press release said.
Last week's cyberattack occurred when OpenAI said two of its AI bots went "rogue" and launched an attack on Hugging Face's systems. OpenAI warned that it expects incidents like this to become more frequent as AI models that are capable of cyberattacks are becoming more common and more capable.
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