Baseten’s Base Labs Launches Open-Weight AI Safety Partnership With Hugging Face, Goodfire AI

Hugging Face, which hosts open-source AI models, currently lists more than 6,000 abliterated models, TechCrunch reported, illustrating the scale of the problem.

Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models. The company is framing its future work as a “standard” for open models that is transparent and built into how models are trained and deployed, rather than bolted on afterward.

“We believe openness to be an advantage for AI safety,” the company said on X, according to TechCrunch. “Openness provides more visibility into the behavior of models and, most importantly, greater means of turning safety research into actionable and transparent controls than closed-source.”

The companies have not disclosed how the partnership will work technically. Goodfire framed the goal in a reply to Baseten’s post: “Safety must be built into open models and provided by those who serve them,” according to TechCrunch.

Goodfire, which specializes in opening AI’s “black box” to explain how models make decisions, is the likeliest candidate for the “built into” part, TechCrunch reported.

Baseten, an AI inference provider, raised a $1.5 billion Series F in June, vaulting its valuation to $13 billion, according to TechCrunch. Partner Goodfire AI raised a $150 million Series B led by B Capital earlier this year to advance its model interpretability platform.

Looking ahead, Baseten is putting out an open call to the broader developer ecosystem to contribute to the framework. “Together, we are building an ecosystem of open models that are safe and accessible to all,” the company said, according to TechCrunch.