Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all

A $60B Vote of Confidence

Current AI is a nonprofit organization that is working to build open, public AI infrastructure to make AI accessible to everyone, regardless of language or location. The organization was founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne and has received funding from the French government, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing the total committed funding to $400 million. The nonprofit's goal is to create a public alternative to the private AI systems developed by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. According to Ayah Bdeir, the CEO of Current AI, "If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it's going to change every aspect of everyone's life, there has to be a public alternative." The nonprofit is working to build a device called Suno Sutra that can run AI in 22 Indian languages offline, and has allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations. The projects include building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education, digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases, building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, and developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent. Current AI's approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point. According to Bdeir, "There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn't be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier." The nonprofit's vision is to create an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data. Current AI has also launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power. Current AI has also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored. According to Bdeir, "Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm." Instead, Current AI is focused on building a system that is accessible and beneficial to everyone, regardless of language or location. The nonprofit's approach is to work with communities and experts to develop AI systems that are tailored to their needs and values. This approach is in contrast to the dominant AI systems developed by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are often designed to maximize profit and are not necessarily beneficial to everyone. By building an open, public AI infrastructure, Current AI hopes to create a system that is more equitable and beneficial to everyone.