Moderating Model Marketplaces: Platform Governance Puzzles for AI Intermediaries

Understand

The AI development community is increasingly making use of hosting intermediaries such as Hugging Face provide easy access to user-uploaded models and training data.

• These model marketplaces lower technical deployment barriers for hundreds of thousands of users, yet can be used in numerous potentially harmful and illegal ways.
• In this article, we explain ways in which AI systems, which can both `contain' content and be open-ended tools, present one of the trickiest platform governance challenges seen to date.
• We provide case studies of several incidents across three illustrative platforms -- Hugging Face, GitHub and Civitai -- to examine how model marketplaces moderate models.