Are AIBOMs Welcome? On the Acceptance and Perception of Artificial Intelligence Bill of Materials on Hugging Face
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes deeply embedded in the software supply chain, traditional governance and management practices are insufficient for addressing complex AI-related dependencies, such as pre-trained models, specialized datasets, and configurations. The Artificial Intelligence Bill of Materials (AIBOM) has emerged as a promising framework for providing the structured inventories needed to improve transparency in AI-powered systems and their underlying models. This paper presents a preliminary empirical investigation into the acceptance and perception of AIBOMs within the Hugging Face community. To this end, we conducted a field study by submitting 278 pull requests containing AIBOMs to a statistically significant sample of popular AI repositories hosted in Hugging Face. Our data analysis reveals a complex landscape: the acceptance of AIBOM-related pull requests was low, but contributions were more likely to be accepted in user-owned repositories than in organization-owned ones. Engagement with the Hugging Face community was limited, and perceptions of AIBOMs were mixed. Overall, these findings suggest that AIBOM adoption may initially emerge in a bottom-up manner and that further efforts, such as improved tooling and targeted adoption initiatives, are needed to support broader uptake.