The latest episode of Uncanny Valley discusses Nvidia's new open-source AI alliance, notably missing OpenAI and Anthropic, and explores the implications for AI policy.
Washington DC, United States Jul 30, 2026 ALN: This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the launch of Nvidia’s splashy alliance to push for open-source AI security alongside companies like Microsoft, SpaceX, and Palantir. Notably absent? OpenAI and Anthropic. Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down what the split means for the industry, and the Trump administration’s own shifting opinions on AI. Plus, we discuss how Claude conversations turned up in Google and Bing search results, and the massive feat of how four whales were rescued and transported from Canada to Chicago.
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to 's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the open source versus closed AI debate that has been completely taking over Silicon Valley this past week. On Monday, Nvidia announced it was joining forces with a whole bunch of companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, to build and share open source AI security tools. We're going to get into the debate why it's heating up and whether this could be an inflection point for how AI actually gets made in the United States.
Leah Feiger: And over at the White House, Trump administration officials have some different opinions about what to do when it comes to AI. We're going to talk about some of the key players influencing the Trump administration right now when it comes to AI policy and how they're actively shaping the conversation on this for the entire country.
Brian Barrett: We'll also break down why Claude chats were exposed in Google search and Bing searches. For those of you who are still on Bing, you are in this as well. For interesting reasons, we'll get into it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, you guys, we have to talk about this strange alliance that formed earlier this week. So, basically Nvidia announced was joining forces with more than 40 companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and IBM to launch something called the Open Secure AI Alliance. Really rolls off the tongue. The stated goal is basically to build and share open source tools for AI-powered cybersecurity defense. But it's really interesting because Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are not on the list. And this news comes on the heels of this incident that happened last week where two OpenAI agents basically went rogue during a security test and breached the AI platform Hugging Face. And when Nvidia announced this alliance, they actually called out this incident by name and said, "It's a clear reminder that cyber defenders need open frontier agentic systems for self-defense." And it's kind of exposed this long-simmering debate, which we've talked about a few times on the podcast, which is that the US has really largely up until this point abandoned open weight and open source in favor of going all in on proprietary systems, and now that's becoming a bit of a problem.
Brian Barrett: This OpenAI incident has really kicked off so many intersecting issues. You've got open versus closed AI, you've got AI security and who's responsible for it. You've got US regulation. We're even at a point now where staffers from top intelligence firms, more than 1100 of them signed a petition calling on the US government to help deliberately pace "AI development" to prevent it from advancing too fast. They're saying, "Please slow us down because this stuff is getting a little out of control." On top of which it turns out that OpenAI's initial disclosure wasn't even the full story. It came out on Tuesday evening that one of its agents actually broke into four different platforms that weren't Hugging Face on its way to getting into Hugging Face. So, it's less of a, here's what this means, but it is really touching so many hot wires in the AI world right now and making a lot of conversations that have been put off for a while come to a head.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I was, I will say, pretty surprised to see that big open letter that you alluded to.
Archival audio: More than 1,000 workers from top AI firms have signed a petition calling on the US government to help, "deliberately pace AI development." The signatories of the letter include the CEO of Anthropic and the chief scientists from OpenAI and Meta Super Intelligence Lab.
Zoë Schiffer: My thought was basically, did we learn nothing from Dario Amodei saying that AI is really scary and dangerous? And then having the US government come down pretty hard on Anthropic asking you might actually receive, I don't know if they want the US government to do what it could do if they listen to the letter quite literally, but it does show that even people, I mean especially people working on AI systems are scared by what the race is doing.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean we talked a lot about this last week for sure when we were talking about DC's reaction and what's going on from the White House perspective. I've been so curious about that split a little bit. Last week we talked about the rift that this has really created in Silicon Valley, the idea of open source versus proprietary AI. This is really touching every single sector right now, without a doubt.
Zoë Schiffer: I will say I was at this event on Saturday with a bunch of AI lobbyists from DC, Thinking Machines. Mira Moradi was there, Michael Kratsios from the White House was there. And I was really struck by how they seem to be operating in this kind of parallel AI world from the one that I see on the ground in San Francisco. They were talking a lot about open source versus closed source. When I talk to engineers in particular, I will say most of them experiment with a lot of open models, but they still find that Codex and Claude code, the coding models from OpenAI and Anthropic, are just far superior. And so, they end up using those even though they're a lot more expensive. Alex Karp was on TV earlier talking about this. He's the CEO of Palantir, basically making this a core issue for America winning the AI race. Palantir and Nvidia, they have a vested interest in pushing forward this plan. More AI, more systems mean more GPUs—that directly benefits Nvidia's bottom line. And Palantir is deploying AI systems on government systems and other places where security is really paramount and they need to do that on American technology, but it's much easier to do it with systems that you can tweak, play around with, modify, change.
Brian Barrett: It is interesting these strange, not strange, but the way that the, I'm going to say battle lines, I don't mean that, it's too dramatic, but that they're being drawn, the sort of argument lines are being drawn in this. To your point, Nvidia's Jensen Huang spoke with Axios recently and he spelled out exactly why the proliferation of open models would benefit his company.
Jensen Huang, archival audio: First of all, with great AI, open models, it's great for the whole industry. If there's great AI, even if it's open, wherever it comes from, there will be more use. Whenever there's more use, you'll have to sell a lot more Nvidia computers. We'll have to build more data centers, we'll have more services. The technology will diffuse into more industries. And so, starting point is great models lead to great use, which leads to great growth.
Brian Barrett: And I think the counterpoint of that too is great disasters in the cybersecurity space leads to more regulation, leads to clamping down on AI, which hurts Nvidia's growth. So, the sort of let's have a security consortium, let's slow everybody's role here, is I think a protective play to say, let's avoid those sort of extreme moments that are going to cause a real crackdown on this industry and really slow the growth, on which, as we've said many times before, a big part of the US economy depends at this point.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it's like you could see this moment where OpenAI's agents kind of go rogue as a moment where the US government does clamp down and says, "This is really scary. We need to slow growth." I think that the open weight, open source push is really an opportunity to say, "Actually, we need more growth. We need more investment, but we need it in this other area." And basically the idea is these attacks are going to keep happening, whether intentionally or not, and US companies need every possible tool at their disposal to defend themselves.
Leah Feiger: So, kind of moving this to DC a little bit, I want to talk about all of the people that are involved with this kind of regulation right now. This week, Hugo published a really handy map on who's actually calling the shots on AI policy inside the Trump administration. It turns out it's not entirely a clear answer, and there's a couple of different influencing voices. And one senior official actually told Hugo, in one of my favorite quotes we've gotten in a while on this, "It's not an argument with two sides, it's an argument with 10 sides." So, the names that he's calling out here, you're not going to be super surprised, right? It's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. It's National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. It's former AI Czar David Sacks. You have Arvind Raman, the acting director for Center for AI Standards and Innovation, who's Lutnick's top deputy there. It's a really, really interesting mix of people who all are trying very, very hard to get their own interests across. And from Hugo's reporting, it seems like Trump is listening to all of them.
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