The news: A coalition of tech giants launched a massive AI safety initiative called Open Secure AI Alliance, aimed at building and sharing open-source AI tools, Nvidia announced in a blog post. The initiative is backed by companies including Adobe, Cisco, Hugging Face, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Salesforce, and SpaceX.

Cisco, Hugging Face, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir also wrote an industry letter on Friday asking regulators to avoid “premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.” Google and OpenAI signed the letter Monday.

As of Monday, both the coalition and the letter exclude Anthropic, which is the only major US AI lab without open-source AI offerings. Its lack of involvement has drawn backlash from Silicon Valley.

This news follows the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face security incident where OpenAI’s models autonomously hacked into Hugging Face’s systems. Nvidia said in the blog post that the incident “delivered a clear reminder: Cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense.”

The bigger picture: Tech firms disagree on how AI models should be developed, controlled, and owned. Open models may give brands and martech vendors more flexibility to customize AI for marketing workflows, reduce vendor lock-in, and deploy models in environments that meet their own privacy and compliance requirements.

Microsoft, Nvidia, and others say open-source AI is necessary to encourage innovation, support cybersecurity efforts, and enhance AI safety.

The latest alliance adds on to the plethora of coalitions supporting different AI security goals.

• Anthropic’s Project Glasswing aims to help labs, software companies, researchers, and governments stay ahead of AI models’ coding capabilities. Members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
• The Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI)—whose founders include Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI—wants to encourage investment in AI security research and sharing of expertise and best practices to encourage safer AI development and deployment.

Implications for marketers: Increasing support for open-source models could encourage a quicker pace of innovation and lower user costs as more tools become interoperable. Open-source models could help AI startups create smaller, lower-cost models through distillation.

Still, the debate over AI safety and governance means marketers will need to navigate a fragmented AI landscape with different capabilities, security standards, and workflow options. Marketers should test providers to determine the best fit for workflows and team-specific tasks and explore adopting a variety of models for redundancies.

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