A new nonprofit called Current AI is racing to build publicly owned artificial intelligence infrastructure that anyone can use for free, challenging the dominance of private companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Founded in February 2025 and backed by $400 million in committed funding from governments, foundations, and tech companies, Current AI aims to create what its leaders describe as the "World Wide Web of AI".

Why Should Communities Care About Open AI Infrastructure?

The problem Current AI is tackling is straightforward but profound: every major artificial intelligence system today is owned and controlled by a private company. This matters because AI is reshaping how people access information, learn, and preserve their cultures. Half the world's spoken languages face extinction, and when AI systems are built primarily in English, entire communities and their knowledge systems get left behind.

"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. Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free," said Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI.

Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI

Bdeir, who previously led Mozilla's AI strategy and founded littleBits, a STEM education company, joined Current AI in January. She emphasizes that the issue goes beyond language translation. When technology cannot speak a community's language, it cannot preserve their culture, traditions, or historical memory.

What Concrete Projects Is Current AI Funding?

Current AI is moving quickly. In its first grant round announced last month, the nonprofit allocated $3.2 million to four organizations working across Africa, the Middle East, and South America. These projects represent a fundamentally different approach to AI development, one where communities maintain control over their own data.

• Masakhane in Kenya: Building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages focused on health, farming, and education applications.
• Institute for Worldmaking in Lebanon: Digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities, not tech companies, control.
• Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil: Creating offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, ensuring data stays within their territory.
• African Internet Rights Alliance in Kenya: Developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the African continent.

Beyond these grants, Current AI launched AlphaChat, an open-source chatbot, at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva earlier this month. The chatbot was assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of 10 organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, with each contributor providing different components like language models, safety tools, and computing resources.

The nonprofit also partnered with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup, to build a shared open-source AI stack designed to support Japanese language and culture, as well as communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.

How Is Current AI Addressing Data Ownership and Consent?

One of the most contentious issues in AI development is who owns the data used to train these systems. Current AI's approach centers on local storage and community control. Rather than uploading data to centralized servers owned by tech companies, the nonprofit's model keeps models and data local, brings in community experts before any development begins, and writes consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.

"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," explained Ayah Bdeir.

Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI

Bdeir acknowledged that none of Current AI's grantees have fully solved the data ownership question yet. However, she sees this as intentional. "Every one of them has built the question into their work," she stated, "rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone".

Bdeir

Who Is Funding This Initiative and Why?

Current AI operates as a public-private partnership bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest technology. The French government seeded the organization with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. Bdeir emphasized that these are funders, not investors seeking financial returns.

The nonprofit's first major initiative was Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized, offline device developed in partnership with Bhashini, India's government AI language division. Announced at the India AI Summit in February, Suno Sutra runs AI in 22 Indian languages without requiring an internet connection. The device is open-sourced, allowing developer communities to build on top of it.

Current AI's approach directly challenges how major tech companies approach multilingual AI. While companies like Google and OpenAI have invested in multilingual models, Bdeir draws a sharp distinction between their approach and Current AI's mission. "Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market," she noted, "regardless of consent or context".

The stakes are high. For Indigenous languages, historical materials like missionary Bible translations often become training data before communities have established any rules about how their cultural knowledge should be used. Current AI's model prioritizes community consent and control from the beginning, not as an afterthought.