Nonprofit Current AI builds open public AI infrastructure for all
Original: Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
Why This Matters
Public AI infrastructure could reshape who controls and benefits from AI at a global scale.
Nonprofit Current AI, founded in February 2025 and backed by $400 million in committed funding from the French government, Ford Foundation, DeepMind, and others, is building open, public AI infrastructure — aiming to be the 'World Wide Web of AI,' free for all users globally.
Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is working to create open, public AI infrastructure as a counterweight to privately owned AI systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy, describes the mission as building a 'World Wide Web of AI' — free and accessible to everyone.
The French government seeded the organization with $100 million; total committed funding has reached $400 million, with contributors including the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. 'They're not investors; they're funders,' Bdeir told TechCrunch.
Current AI has moved quickly since launch. Last month it allocated $3.2 million in grants across four organizations. Last week, it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. In February, in partnership with Bhashini — the Indian government's AI language division — it unveiled Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device running AI across 22 Indian languages without internet access.
Bdeir warned that Big Tech's multilingual efforts serve market expansion rather than community needs, citing cases where Indigenous language data — such as missionary Bible translations — becomes AI training data before communities establish any data governance rules. 'Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next,' she said.