A nonprofit called Current AI is working to build publicly accessible AI infrastructure modeled on the early World Wide Web — free, open, and available to anyone. The organization, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, has been moving quickly in 2026: it distributed $3.2 million in grants last month, launched an open-source chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva last week, and partnered with the Indian government to release an offline AI device supporting 22 Indian languages.
Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January 2026 after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, told TechCrunch the core problem is straightforward: every major AI system today — from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic — belongs to a private company. “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,” she said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
The organization operates as a public-private partnership. The French government seeded it with $100 million, with additional funding from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. Bdeir was clear that these contributors are funders, not investors.
Current AI’s first grant cohort deployed $3.2 million across four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. Projects include building AI datasets in more than 50 African languages, digitizing Arab cultural history into community-controlled databases, developing offline AI tools for Indigenous Amazon communities, and creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across Africa.
In Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. The nonprofit also struck a partnership with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese and Global South communities.
Bdeir argues that Big Tech’s multilingual efforts differ fundamentally from Current AI’s approach. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” Current AI’s model stores data locally and requires community consent before anything is built, with communities able to halt the process at any point.
Source: TechCrunch