As frontier AI concentrates inside a handful of well-funded labs, a nonprofit is trying to build a public alternative. On July 19, TechCrunch detailed how Current AI, a Paris-based organization, is racing to construct what it calls a "World Wide Web of AI" — free, open infrastructure so that marginalized languages and cultures are not locked out of systems built by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Who is behind it
Current AI was founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne and is now led by CEO Ayah Bdeir, the former head of Mozilla's AI strategy and founder of the electronics startup littleBits. Its argument is that AI is becoming foundational infrastructure — and that leaving it entirely to proprietary vendors repeats the mistakes of a closed internet.
The money
The effort is unusually well-capitalized for a nonprofit: roughly $400 million committed, anchored by a $100 million seed pledge from the French government. Additional backers include the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google DeepMind and Salesforce — a mix of public, philanthropic and corporate money.
What it has shipped
Current AI is already producing artifacts. Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot, was assembled in seven weeks by a 10-organization coalition including Hugging Face, Mozilla and the MIT Media Lab, and launched at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. Suno Sutra is a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, built with India's government Bhashini division. The group recently allocated $3.2 million in grants across four organizations.
The bet
The wager is that public-interest AI can be built fast enough and cheaply enough to matter alongside commercial systems. The language and offline-device work targets exactly the users the market underserves — and tests whether "open and public" can be more than a slogan against players spending tens of billions.