Nvidia defends open source AI alliance, saying hundreds and hundreds of companies being vetted
Tech.eu John Reynolds
Nvidia says its open AI safety group has hundreds of companies waiting to join. It’s trying to look practical, not performative, as the open-vs-closed fight heats up.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, John Reynolds — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia is pushing back on the idea that its open-source AI safety coalition is just branding. Speaking at the Open Source summit in Prague, the company’s cybersecurity policy chief Mark Weatherford argued that the Open Secure AI Alliance is meant to do real work on AI safety and cyber defence, not sit on a slide deck while everyone races for advantage.
The alliance was announced in July, only days after the Hugging Face hack that Nvidia said helped sharpen the need for it. Its members include Mistral, Hugging Face, UiPath, Microsoft, Adobe and Dell. Google, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI are not on the list shown on the alliance website.
Weatherford said the group is now run by the Linux Foundation and that its usefulness will depend on whether members actually collaborate and share. He also acknowledged the obvious tension: companies will always weigh the benefits of cooperation against what helps them commercially. That is the whole open-source trick, and also the whole headache.
On the question of why OpenAI is absent, Weatherford said the foundation still has “hundreds and hundreds” of companies waiting to be vetted. He added that not every company, country or organisation will be welcome, because the alliance has to clear participants through a vetting process first. The original open letter that helped launch the effort drew more than 200 tech companies, and TechCrunch has reported that OpenAI and Google signed it. OpenAI, Google and Meta have since released open-weight models of their own.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly the kind of coalition Silicon Valley loves: broad, serious-sounding, and still carefully fenced off. Nvidia wants the halo of open source without pretending trust appears on demand, which is at least more honest than the usual AI virtue fog. The real story is not who is inside yet, but how many companies want in while the industry keeps arguing about openness with one hand and moat-building with the other.
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