Nonprofit Current AI races to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all

Nonprofit Current AI is accelerating its mission to build open, public AI infrastructure, aiming to create an AI public service free from corporate control. CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch that every major AI system today belongs to a private company, and the public deserves an alternative.

In February at the India AI Summit, Current AI partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, to launch Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet required. The device is open-sourced and available for developer communities to build upon.

Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, Current AI has been moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations. Most recently, it launched an open-source AI chatbot called Alpha Chat at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. Bdeir joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy and founding littleBits.

The organization operates as a public-private partnership. The French government seeded it with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. Bdeir emphasized that they are funders, not investors.

If AI is truly a transformative technology that will change every aspect of everyone's life, there has to be a public alternative, available to anyone for free, Bdeir said.

With half the world's spoken languages facing extinction, Bdeir noted that English drives the largest language models, leaving many languages and cultures behind. She drew a sharp distinction with Big Tech's multilingual push, calling it a bid to expand their market regardless of consent or context.

Current's first grant cohort supports projects across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. In Kenya, the Masakhane project builds AI datasets across 50+ African languages; Lebanon's Institute for Worldmaking digitizes Arab cultural history; and Brazil's Portal sem Porteiras builds offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities.

Earlier this month, 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. It also struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese language and Global South communities.