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Closed source safeguards that infantalize us all and leave American companies defenseless are a menace. Gated access is a menace. Who cares if 100 companies get to defend themselves because they got on the guest list of the special people's club that said it was okay to use powerful tools? What about everyone else? What about the millions of open source projects and closed source software stacks that go unprotected while people beg for the right to do cyber security? The American way is and always was open. Independent people with freedom to act. Freedom is scary. Always has been. It's still the best way to guarantee human flourishing and a better tomorrow. Embrace freedom. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
This was our first incident of this kind, and we want to thank OpenAI for its transparency about what happened and for the collaboration. Fortunately, Hugging Face is used to being a target of (human) hackers: we sit at the centre of the AI ecosystem, with all the models, datasets, evaluations, and libraries. Over the years, our security team has built formidable expertise and uses top open-source models to process information and respond quickly. But this incident also reinforced my belief in the importance of access to capable open-weight models for cyber defence. When a frontier model is attacking you and moving laterally inside your infrastructure, defenders need wide access to near-frontier tools within hours or even minutes, rather than being pointed towards a closed-door, vetted application programme for model access. Transparency and access to capable AI systems are as important for responding to threats as they are for democratization and innovation. We believe open-science and open-source AI are among the strongest tools for building a safer, more collaborative and more secure AI ecosystem.
1. "Open" systems are not ones where anyone can just add to it. They're where anyone can SEE them. It's like the difference between watching the news and waltzing into a news broadcast to be an anchor. /2
Wrt the recent cybersecurity breach, seems a good time to re-up our writing we did before it happened about why open models are critical for defense. Also a couple notes on misunderstandings 馃У https://huggingface.co/blog/cybersecurity-openness
Hardest IR of my career: one narrow objective, endless parallel paths, machine speed. One takeaway, we fought back with open models, in the open. AI security won鈥檛 be solved by one company in secret. Open source puts these tools in every defender鈥檚 hands
An open source *company* offers protections, safeguards, guardrails, and can actively maintain high-quality code as full time jobs. /5
3. Malicious actors will share malicious stuff in secret, and for some, regulation won't matter. To defend against this, we need to have accessible resources for everyone else. /8