Hi everyone, I would like to provide an update regarding the recent "airflow-steward" and "airflow-s" messages you may have seen. I mistakenly configured a new repository to send notifications to the dev@ list, unintentionally sharing some early-stage details a bit sooner than I thought.
I have been working at an accelerated pace (pretty much 150% of my time over the last one-two months) due to an emerging security "crisis" in the industry. New AI models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos (which resulted in the recently announced cross-industry Project Glasswing [1]), have become exceptionally fast at identifying and chaining security vulnerabilities. This has forced a shift in how we handle security, moving from reactive responses to proactive scanning. We expect an exponential growth in high-quality security reports, and we are preparing to catch these issues during the development process—before code is even released. Last month, the ASF announced the Responsible AI Initiative [2], supported by Anthropic and Alpha-Omega. I am currently leading a proposal to transition our recent work into a new "Apache Steward" PMC, which is expected to be discussed at the next ASF board meeting on May 20th. Because of the urgency, I have had to make some rapid decisions and move faster than our usual PMC pace. My goal is to ensure Apache Steward helps the open-source community navigate this transition successfully. For Airflow (and other projects), this starts with self-cleaning of security issues first. It very likely means a renewed focus on the "Airflow Beach Cleaning" [3] initiative to prune historical baggage and manage dependencies more effectively using new agentic tooling (it had previously hit some scaling roadblocks - that are now unblocked with Agentic AI). We now have Airflow Steward [4] as the first stage of the "extracting tooling" - this will likely become "Apache Steward" - if all stars align. I apologize for the hectic communication. I will continue to keep everyone updated as things progress. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask here. We can keep that thread to keep everyone updated. Best regards, Jarek Potiuk [1] Project Glasswing https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing [2] Responsible AI Initiative of ASF - https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-launches-10m-responsible-ai-initiative-with-initial-1-75m-donation [3] Airflow Beach Cleaning Keynote from Airflow Summit 2024 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6gfoVJXWEE [4] Airflow Steward - https://github.com/apache/airflow-steward
