# Hugging Face and VirusTotal collaborate to strengthen AI security

[Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face) · Adrien Carreira, Bernardo Quintero · Oct 22, 2025

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Hugging Face announced a collaboration with VirusTotal to enhance the security of files shared across the Hugging Face Hub. Hosting more than 2.2 million public model and dataset repositories, the platform faces potential threats from malicious payloads, compromised files, and dependencies that execute unsafe code. Starting immediately, public repositories on the Hub undergo continuous scanning powered by VirusTotal threat intelligence. When users view repository or file pages, the Hub checks file hashes against VirusTotal without transferring raw file contents, preserving user privacy. Retrieved metadata displays detection counts, clean or malicious status, and known-bad relationships, enabling organizations to evaluate risks prior to downloading assets or integrating them into deployment pipelines.

## Context

Artificial intelligence models and datasets are complex digital artifacts containing large binary files, serialized data, and dependencies that can carry risks such as disguised malicious payloads, compromised files, malware links, or unsafe execution code. Hugging Face Hub hosts over 2.2 million public model artifacts, making security verification necessary to protect the machine learning community from malicious assets.

## Approach / What changed

Hugging Face integrated continuous scanning with VirusTotal across all 2.2 million public repositories. When users visit repository or file pages, the Hub queries VirusTotal by comparing file hashes against its threat intelligence database without sending raw file contents. The integration retrieves statuses, detection counts, known-bad relationships, and threat campaign metadata.

## Takeaways

- Hugging Face is continuously scanning over 2.2 million public model and dataset repositories using VirusTotal threat intelligence.
- To preserve user privacy and data protection principles, Hugging Face checks file hashes against VirusTotal rather than sharing raw file contents.
- Scan results presented on repository and file pages include detection counts, clean or malicious status, known-bad relationships, and associated threat-campaign intelligence.

**Tags:** [CI/CD](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ci-cd), [Machine Learning](https://yomu.fyi/topic/machine-learning), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Privacy](https://yomu.fyi/topic/privacy)

[Read original post](https://huggingface.co/blog/virustotal)