AI startup Perplexity has joined the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition led by Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM to develop open-source cybersecurity tools for large language models. The company announced its membership alongside the release of Bumblebee, a read-only security scanner that runs locally on macOS and Linux clients to identify software vulnerabilities.

The alliance was formed following a Hugging Face cyberattack where proprietary security models blocked defensive forensic analysis, forcing the company to deploy a self-hosted open-weight Chinese AI to process more than 17,000 actions and contain the breach. Perplexity will contribute additional security tools and benchmarks to help developers build autonomous systems without relying on closed vendor gatekeeping.