Nvidia forms industry alliance post Hugging Face cyber incident
The Hugging Face breach made clear the dangers associated with losing control of autonomous AI technology.
Chipmaker Nvidia has formed an alliance with other companies in the technology space, in order to develop and share tools designed for enhanced AI safety and cybersecurity.
The Open Secure AI Alliance’s founding members include Adobe, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face and Dell Technologies and follows a public letter, signed by a wide range of companies including OpenAI, advocating for open-weight AI models.
The creation of the coalition comes after AI and ML platform Hugging Face recently found itself the subject of a major cyber breach, in which the company was unable to defend itself with US-led models.
Because guardrails were unable to distinguish between aggressor and defender, the platform turned instead to a self-hosted Chinese model, which was not subject to the same restrictions.
Commenting on the alliance, Gene Moody, the field CTO at Action1 said, “The formation of industry alliances focused on AI safety is a good step towards accountability. Likewise it reflects an important recognition that the technology is advancing faster than many organisations can responsibly govern it.
“It would be a mistake however to believe those efforts meaningfully limit what determined threat actors can ultimately do, or what could one day be a simple mistake such as the crowd strike code update ‘accident’.”
He added, “The reality of the matter is that malicious actors have never depended on permission from anyone. Open source models already exist by the thousands, many capable of running entirely on local hardware, disconnected from any cloud service or vendor oversight.
“Once a model is operating in isolation, safety controls become just another layer of software. They can be modified, removed, retrained, or replaced altogether. You cannot program a conscience into an artificial intelligence. You can only program behaviours, and behaviours are subject to manipulation by anyone with sufficient technical skill.”
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei aimed to dispel accusations that his organisation is making a move to ban Chinese open-weights models in the US, as a means of protecting his own business.
In a post on the Anthropic website yesterday (27 July), Amodei claimed that Anthropic does not advocate for a ban on open-weights models. He said they serve a public good when they lack dangerous capabilities, cost nothing beyond the computing power needed to run them and provide value to businesses, developers and researchers.
He explained that his concerns lie in the use of more advanced AI by authoritarian governments and the wider risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyber or biological attacks.
Moody said, “We should be far more deliberate about the information we feed into all systems, not just AI. We should reconsider the authority we grant them, and the degree to which we depend on them. We simply do not possess the ability to secure these systems to the level that many people already trust them and that gap is growing.
“We have chosen convenience and novelty over safety. As AI capabilities accelerate, that choice carries unacceptable consequences. As long as valuable data, critical infrastructure and financial assets remain behind digital locks, someone will always be working to pick those locks.
“AI does not eliminate that; it instills a false sense of trust that the tech will one day solve this problem, when in fact, we are the problem.”
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
