Blazing Forward: Building Open Source Safety in the Year of the Horse

Today, millions of people around the world celebrate the Lunar New Year. Each year combines one of 12 zodiac animals with one of five elements. 2026 brings us the Fire Horse: fire's intensity paired with the horse's speed and independence. The symbolism feels uncomfortably apt. We're living through rapid technological acceleration against a backdrop of global turbulence and although Fire Horse is said to bring progress and transformation, it will be through disruption and volatility. When I look at the Trust & Safety field, I see a landscape that demands exactly this: ,[object Object], and adaptation without compromising thoughtful decision making.

I didn’t grow up in a particularly superstitious family, but I find comfort in my cultural history during times where the world makes less and less sense. As an ABC (American Born Chinese), I spent my weekends studying Chinese language and history. I picked up a few idioms and phrases along the way.

塞翁失马: The old man lost his horse

Sai weng shi ma essentially means that there can be hidden positives in situations that don’t seem hopeful. When I talk to people about the current state of the internet, I hear a lot of doom and fear. When I talk to online safety professionals, that same sentiment is scaled up with an awareness that we cannot keep depending on the same cultural support, proprietary technology, and methods that the field has gotten used to in the past decade.

The threat landscape is accelerating faster than traditional defenses can match, especially in the silos that platforms operate in. Many types of online abuse that used to involve human coordination over time can now be done via prompts to AI models that can target multiple people at once. The defenses that online platforms relied on to differentiate between high-prevalence harms like spam and lower-prevalence but higher impact harms like child exploitation or NCII are not suited for today’s online battleground. Adversaries are using the same LLMs we are, at scale, to reverse-engineer defenses and generate attacks that morph faster than static systems can respond. The infrastructure that got us here won't bring us forward into the future. I know this because I’ve built these internal tools for companies several times over.

马到成功: When the horse arrives, success arrives

One proverb I learned was 马到成功 (ma dao cheng gong), or “success arrives once the horse does”. The phrase comes from military history: horses were critical for winning battles, and their arrival meant victory was coming. My WeChat groups have been lighting up with this phrase for the past 24 hours but I want to use it here to emphasize that although the future is scary, those of us working in online safety contexts can and will succeed if we work together and we work quickly.

This does not mean “move fast and break things”; that’s also something we need to leave in the past. Every move we make must be strategic and future-facing.

As Martin Tisne of AI Collaborative wrote, open stacks enable this third way. Openness in artificial intelligence makes it possible to build safety systems that are both powerful and accountable. The possibilities that AI brings go both ways: immense innovation and threats we're still trying to understand. Our ambition to leverage AI for protecting online spaces must not outrun our ability to build systems that people can actually operate and maintain. We're navigating constant trade-offs in our projects’ architecture, in the design of the tools, and who we’re building for.

But we're doing it in the open, which means the trade-offs are visible and debatable - as they should be. The community sees the decisions, contributes to solutions, and helps course-correct when we get things wrong. Building in the open is how we channel the fire's energy toward growth rather than just destruction.

众人拾柴火焰高: The fire grows hotter when more hands feed it

Zhong ren shi chai huo yan gao - the fire grows hotter when more hands feed it. Open source flips the traditional model: shared infrastructure means collective defense. In Chinese philosophy (like many based on agrarian societies), fire can destroy but clear the way for new growth with more fertile foundations. Legacy approaches to online safety are failing whether we acknowledge it or not. Closed, proprietary systems cannot iterate fast enough to match the pace of AI-powered threats. The concentration of power in walled gardens is failing the people who need safety online.

Building safety infrastructure in a public commons makes it more resilient because it doesn't depend on any single organization's priorities or survival. Self-hosted deployment means sensitive data stays in-network while enabling customization for specific threats. These systems end up smarter because the community validates approaches across different platforms and threat models.

Proprietary safety tools treat each platform as an isolated problem, forcing everyone to rebuild the same defenses from scratch. There has been progress in signal sharing across platforms, but organizations still need a way to each act on those signals at scale. By moving to open safety infrastructure, the engineering efforts to maintain and improve internal tools is distributed and lightens the load for everyone.

马不停蹄: The horse never stops its hooves

The Fire Horse symbolizes freedom and self-direction. Platforms need autonomy over their safety stack and the ability to change things in a moment’s notice because the world is unpredictable.

Ma bu ting ti, or the horse that never stops its hooves, means relentless progress. This is the moment where we need independent, autonomous action and we cannot lose momentum now, when the stakes are so high and the needs are so great. Open source software makes it possible to move quickly and have a complete safety system that’s customizable so everyone is able to make the decisions that make the most sense for their platform.

Tools like Osprey and Coop are moving from pilots to production deployments for independent developers, startups, and more established companies. This is the year that open source safety becomes an institutional reality and we get to press reset on how we’ve been doing online safety. The Year of the Fire Horse asks: will you move fast enough? Will you build something that endures?

Yes and yes, when we work together. The horse is here. 马到成功!

(4 is unlucky so here’s a 5th idiom for you: 马上有钱, ma shang you qian, which means get rich soon!)