Akritai were locals who were to be used as the defenders of the borders instead of deploying regular Army or mercenaries. For this reason they were given land (so as to have skin in the game) and tax breaks. When the tax breaks stopped the Akritai rapidly vanished. These are also mentioned in Wikipedia pages.
So, in terms of a security project an Akritas would be you running an EDR agent on a machine that you own, not some of the signatory companies who basically do not own anything on the edge (end user equipment).
Com'on, it's not that bad. The idea of these organizations is that, since they're using and testing this software, "we'll see any issues first, we'll let you know, and we'll deal with it." The quoted part bears some resemblance to the tasks of Akrites.
Remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself: when the tax breaks/ free AI use stops, will anyone keep doing this?
Disclaimer: I have had nothing to do with this initiative, and was not consulted on the name.