What we didn't fully anticipate was how broadly it would be adopted. Today, Safetensors is the default format for model distribution across the Hugging Face Hub and others, used by tens of thousands of models across all modalities in ML. It has become the preferred way for the open source ML community to share models.

We want Safetensors to truly belong to the community. The project has always been open source, but code contributions are just one part of its evolution. By bringing more companies and contributors into the governance of the project, we make sure that progress reflects the breadth of the community building on top of it. Joining the PyTorch Foundation means Safetensors now has a vendor-neutral home. The trademark, the repository, and the governance of the project sit with the Linux Foundation rather than any single company. Hugging Face's two core maintainers, Luc and Daniel, remain on the Technical Steering Committee and continue to lead the project day-to-day, but Safetensors now formally belongs to the community that depends on it.

We believe safety is best guaranteed when every contributor can build on what already exists; a principle now embedded in the project's governance itself.

For the vast majority of users, nothing changes. The format is the same, the APIs are the same, the Hub integration is the same: no breaking changes. Models stored in Safetensors format today will continue to work exactly as they do now.