Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is building public AI infrastructure modeled on the open web, funded by a $400 million coalition including the French government, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. CEO Ayah Bdeir, previously Mozilla’s AI strategy lead and founder of littleBits, argues that every major AI system today belongs to a private company and that a public alternative is necessary. “If AI is truly a transformative technology … there has to be a public alternative,” she said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”

The nonprofit’s first concrete product, Suno Sutra (Hindi for “listening chronicles”), emerged from a February partnership with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. It is a pocket-sized offline device running AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet connection required. The device is open-sourced. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Bdeir said.

Current AI‘s first grant round deployed $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. Masakhane in Kenya is building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education. Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history into machine-readable databases controlled by communities. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras builds offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance develops audit tools for AI accountability across the continent.

On data ownership, Bdeir said, “It shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier.” Current AI stores models and data locally, involves community experts before building, and writes consent protocols so communities can halt processes at any point. None of the grantees have fully solved data governance yet, but Bdeir sees that as intentional. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default.”

Bdeir criticized Big Tech’s multilingual push as market expansion “regardless of consent or context,” noting that missionary Bible translations become training data for Indigenous languages “before communities have set any rules.” She also described language as foundational to culture: “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either.”

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. It also struck a deal with Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese language and culture, and communities across the Global South.