More than a dozen of the country’s largest technology providers and AI developers have launched the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), which they are billing as an open source community that aims to provide guidance and tools to practitioners and developers to create secure-by-design artificial intelligence systems.
The group said its founding “premier sponsors” are Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and PayPal. Other founding sponsors include Amazon, Anthropic, Cisco, Chainguard, Cohere, GenLab, OpenAI, and Wiz.
CoSAI is being run by OASIS Open, a Woburn, Mass.-based nonprofit consortium that works on the development and adoption of open standards and open source projects in a variety of technology categories including security, blockchain, cloud computing, and data exchange.
The coalition said it aims to “enhance trust and security in AI use and deployment,” and to “develop comprehensive security measures that address AI systems’ classical and unique risks.”
The group said its scope includes “securely building, integrating, deploying, and operating AI systems, focusing on mitigating risks such as model theft, data poisoning, prompt injection, scaled abuse, and inference attacks.”
To get to those goals, the coalition said its three initial workstreams will include:
- Software supply chain security for AI systems: enhancing composition and provenance tracking to secure AI applications;
- Preparing defenders for a changing cybersecurity landscape: addressing investments and integration challenges in AI and classical systems; and
- AI security governance: developing best practices and risk assessment frameworks for AI security.
David LaBianca, a senior director at Google who is co-chair of the CoSAI governing board, said the organization’s creation is “rooted in the necessity of democratizing the knowledge and advancements essential for the secure integration and deployment of AI.”
“We are committed to collaborating with organizations at the forefront of responsible and secure AI technology,” added Omar Santos, a distinguished engineer at Cisco, who also serves as co-chair of the CoSAI governing board. “At CoSAI, we will harness our combined expertise and resources to fast-track the development of robust AI security standards and practices that will benefit the entire industry.”
