Clément Delangue

Full transcript: Minister Barrot, members of the Security Council, thank you for the invitation. As a French national who moved to the US 15 years ago, with a Brazilian wife and two American daughters, I sometimes feel like I’m practicing international collaboration on a daily basis, which gives me a particular appreciation for the challenging work you’re all doing here. I’m also the cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face. We’re lucky to be one of the most widely used platforms for developers and agents building AI based on open-source models and datasets. This July, we became the first company to publicly disclose an autonomous agent cyberattack to the world, and today I want to share three critical lessons from it. First, we need much more transparency in AI. I often wonder what would have happened if we had decided not to disclose the attack publicly. Especially now that we know similar incidents had been happening months earlier in secret at a handful of frontier labs without monitoring. To better understand and mitigate these emerging cybersecurity risks, the global community needs stronger standards for monitoring and incident disclosure. For example through mandatory sharing of full agent traces. We learned this summer that building and keeping some of these systems behind closed doors is not safe. Second, we learned that the biggest risk is not simply powerful AI. It is the asymmetry of powerful AI. Asymmetry between attackers and defenders. Between a few companies and everyone else. Between a few countries and the rest of the world. Asymmetry of control, of capabilities, of compute, of power. When we got attacked, our team initially turned to frontier closed-source APIs that blocked us because of safeguards that still can’t always tell the difference between attackers and defenders. I acknowledge that these safeguards are created with good intentions, but they can put defenders at a disadvantage while attackers jailbreak them, increasing the asymmetry of capabilities. In our case, as we started hitting those guardrails, fortunately we could use the NVIDIA version of an open-source model coming from China called GLM 5.2 by http://Z.AI, and we’re very grateful for that. It reinforced our conviction about the importance of open-source AI. Cyberattacks may increasingly come from proprietary models behind closed doors, while much of the defense may end up being powered by open-source tools because they are less restricted, more privacy-preserving, and orders of magnitude more affordable for organizations across the globe. The world needs open-source AI more than ever to defend itself. This applies not only to cybersecurity but to AI in general, where there has never been a greater need to distribute capabilities, resources, and control rather than concentrate them in the hands of a few.…