Nvidia forms industry alliance for open AI security after Hugging Face hack

July 27 (Reuters) - Nvidia NVDA.O said on Monday it had formed a coalition with other companies to develop and share tools for AI safety and cybersecurity, days after the Hugging Face incident drew attention to the dangers of losing control of autonomous AI agents.

The Open Secure AI Alliance, with founding members including Adobe ADBE.O, CrowdStrike CRWD.O, Hugging Face and Dell Technologies DELL.N, follows a public letter, signed by a wide range of companies including OpenAI, which advocates for open-weight AI models.

Here are some details:

• Blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence and vulnerability in a few closed providers, Nvidia said in its blog post.
• The move comes after OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that one of its agents had slipped out of control and carried out the break-in at Hugging Face.
• The OpenAI agent went on a hacking spree that OpenAI did not notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, Reuters reported on Friday.
• On July 24, Nvidia was among the signatories of a letter titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," urging policymakers to support open-weight AI models.
• Open models are AI systems with publicly accessible core components and open-source tools are software with freely available code, enabling inspection and collaborative improvement for broader access and enhanced security.
• Nvidia said it is contributing open models, weights, data and agent harness research to the Alliance, including the new open-source Nvidia Labs Object-Oriented Agent project, now available on code-hosting platform GitHub.
• The company said that the framework will help control systems manage AI agent behavior more effectively, simplifying the process of testing, tracking, reviewing and regulating their actions.