Current AI wants a free public web for AI

A $400 million nonprofit is trying to build a public alternative to today’s private AI systems. Current AI, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, says its goal is open, community-controlled AI infrastructure that works more like the early World Wide Web — free to use and not locked inside a handful of companies.

One example is Suno Sutra, unveiled after Current AI partnered in February at the India AI Summit with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The open-source, pocket-sized offline device runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet connection required. Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch the problem is urgent in a country with hundreds of languages and dialects that are barely represented in modern AI.

Bdeir joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company sold to Sphero in 2019. She described Current AI as a public-private partnership funded by governments, companies, and philanthropies rather than investors. The French government provided an initial $100 million, with support from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million.

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“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.”

Grants focused on language, culture, and local control

Last month, Current AI announced $3.2 million in grants across four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon:

• Masakhane in Kenya is building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education.
• Institute for Worldmaking in Lebanon is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases controlled by communities.
• Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil is developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities while keeping data within the territory.
• African Internet Rights Alliance in Kenya is building audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

Bdeir drew a sharp line between Current AI’s approach and multilingual projects from large tech firms, arguing that corporate efforts often expand market reach first and deal with consent and context later. She said Current AI instead tries to keep models and data local, involve community experts before systems are built, and bake consent protocols into the process so communities can stop a project at any point.

Alpha Chat and the open-source AI stack

Current AI is also moving quickly on tooling. At the AI for Good Summit in Geneva last week, it 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. Earlier, last month, it had already distributed the $3.2 million grant round.

The nonprofit has also partnered with Sakana AI, the Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. Together, they plan to build a shared open-source AI stack aimed at supporting Japanese language and culture as well as communities across the Global South that mainstream AI systems have largely overlooked.