ROOST Reminds Us Why Open Source Tools Matter

Fatima Faisal Khan is an Ecosystem Trust and Safety Associate at the Institute for Security and Technology.

At the recent Paris AI Action Summit, the launch of ROOST (Robust Online Open Safety Tools) captured the attention of trust and safety professionals. ROOST is a not-for-profit open source tooling hub designed to empower trust and safety engineers by providing ready-to-deploy software to avoid reinventing the wheel whenever they need to develop a new tool. At the same time, each platform retains its own governance and policy decisions. By making interoperable, state-of-the-art tools more widely accessible, the initiative aims to democratize trust and safety practices and foster ecosystem-wide growth in digital safety.

Open source is not a cure-all solution: maintaining these tools and ensuring secure implementation can pose challenges, from misaligned incentives and responsibilities to potential security gaps. Even so, ROOST’s substantial funding of $27 million from backers like Google, OpenAI, Discord, and Roblox underscores a growing conviction that collaborative, transparent solutions can help address the most pressing challenges in digital safety.

Open source could be a catalyst for trust and safety

What sets ROOST apart is its emphasis on open source at a time when trust and safety efforts are often fragmented and reinvented from one platform to the next. Models like Roblox’s voice safety classifier and Google Jigsaw’s Altitude tool hint at how shared code can enable more efficient, agile solutions, though they also illustrate the need for continuous oversight to avoid spreading outdated or vulnerable software. Through open source, platforms can pool their expertise and rapidly refine tools, benefiting from a global developer community that can spot weaknesses and drive innovation. This collaborative dynamic has the potential to transform isolated battles against online harm into coordinated campaigns, but it requires consistent engagement, transparent governance, and dedicated resources to succeed. By balancing these complexities with the promise of open collaboration, trust and safety practitioners can work toward scalable and more impactful approaches to safeguarding digital spaces.

Lessons from open-source software development

Open source principles have shaped the technology sector for decades, driving innovations in everything from operating systems to networking tools. Cybersecurity underwent a notable transformation in the 1980s and 90s as open software enabled countless experts to scrutinize, test, and refine code. This “many eyes” principle often led to faster detection of vulnerabilities and more effective patching. However, open source software can also become a weak link when widely used components are neglected or under-resourced. Without consistent oversight, vulnerabilities in these components can propagate across commercial products at scale.

These realities underscore the duality of open source: while transparency and community collaboration can bolster security, they also demand proactive maintenance and shared responsibility. There is growing interest in harnessing AI to help maintain and monitor open source codebases, ensuring that patches and improvements are applied before issues escalate. By adopting this balanced approach, trust and safety professionals can draw on the best aspects of open source—collective problem-solving, transparency, and agility—to create solutions that stay ahead of emerging threats.

Balancing risks and rewards

Critics of open source tools often point to potential pitfalls: concerns about compliance, the risk of exploitation by hackers, and the challenges of managing decentralized contributions. These are valid considerations, and any tool—open or closed—carries risk. Indeed, the open source ecosystem has experienced large-scale vulnerabilities like log4j, highlighting how a small pool of developers can carry disproportionate responsibility. Yet, these incidents also reveal why greater transparency and community collaboration are essential. When vulnerabilities are discovered, a diverse group of contributors can often respond more quickly, turning potential threats into opportunities for collective improvement.

It’s important to recognize that open access is not a silver bullet, and some research observes how openness can introduce its own complexities. Still, major tech players investing in an open source tooling solution for trust and safety is a sign that the benefits of a transparent, community-driven approach can outweigh the drawbacks when managed responsibly. Their confidence in ROOST, coupled with careful oversight and a commitment to collaborative development, suggests that an open source strategy can be both secure and sustainable as the trust and safety field evolves.

Challenges on the horizon

Despite significant industry enthusiasm and substantial funding, ROOST’s ambitious vision of widespread adoption and interoperability faces some notable hurdles. Observers have pointed out that while the initiative boasts impressive backing from tech giants, the absence of major platforms, including Meta, Reddit, and Snap, could limit ROOST’s ability to establish ecosystem-wide standards. Without broad adoption, the promise of interoperability risks falling short, leading to fragmentation rather than cohesion across the trust and safety landscape. If ROOST proves its value in collaboration with early adopters, other key industry players may be more inclined to join. Demonstrating tangible benefits such as improved efficiency, stronger cross-platform alignment, or reduced operational costs could be a powerful incentive for holdouts to participate, mitigating concerns about the lack of complete ecosystem coverage.

Moreover, ROOST’s core strength—its multistakeholder, collaborative model—could introduce inefficiencies or misalignment when diverse participants bring competing priorities. Smaller developers and nonprofits may lack the resources or expertise to adapt these tools effectively, risking exclusion despite the initiative’s openness. Here, ROOST can proactively reduce barriers, perhaps by offering training, grants, or dedicated technical support for under-resourced organizations. Such targeted measures would help counter the critique that collaborative models leave the most vulnerable actors behind.

Technical challenges also loom: integrating ROOST’s open source tools into existing workflows or decentralized systems may prove difficult, and over-customization could inadvertently create fragmentation, hindering interoperability. Complicating matters further, ROOST does not provide universal content moderation guidelines, requiring platforms to independently develop and maintain their own rules. Yet, these challenges are not unique to ROOST: other open source initiatives in areas like AI safety, such as Inspect by the UK’s AI Safety Institute, face similar issues, highlighting the difficulty in balancing ease-of-use with advanced functionality. Even user-friendly, low-code, or no-code platforms marketed to simplify development require meaningful training and technical expertise for complex use cases. With sustained investment, strategic partnerships, and a willingness to refine governance structures, ROOST could harness its openness as a strength rather than a stumbling block, ensuring that open source becomes a sustainable catalyst for trust and safety innovation.

The path forward: open source tools for a vibrant, resilient trust and safety community

The trust and safety community has weathered significant upheavals in recent years, from mass layoffs to the rollback of content moderation policies. Yet, amid these challenges, we have also witnessed remarkable strides toward a unified and resilient community. Landmark developments such as the Trust and Safety Professionals Association, Digital Trust and Safety Partnership, the Integrity Institute, and pivotal gatherings such as the Stanford Trust and Safety Conference have helped shape a vibrant field. In parallel, free and publicly available initiatives, ranging from the Trust and Safety Curriculum and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium to the Trust and Safety Archive and similar endeavors, have long championed accessible knowledge and tools, laying a strong foundation for collective advancement.

By aligning with these pioneering efforts, ROOST not only bridges essential capability gaps, particularly for smaller organizations often sidelined by expensive, closed-source systems, but also serves as a mechanism to coordinate the field. The initiative represents more than just a technical breakthrough; it embodies the promise of a new era in trust and safety. By rallying around open source, the community can rebuild its infrastructure based on shared resources, collective intelligence, and mutual support. Just as open source helped software development to evolve into a field characterized by collaboration and rapid innovation, the trust and safety field has the potential to redefine itself through open source. ROOST embodies the promise of open source: to foster an environment where technology evolves in step with emerging threats. The support for ROOST since its launch makes one thing clear: the trust and safety community recognizes that an open source tooling hub can elevate the entire sector and help cultivate a resilient ecosystem—one where shared responsibility, resources, and intelligence pave the way for safer digital spaces.

Editor's note: ROOST receives support from the Knight Foundation, which has provided grants to Tech Policy Press.