Nonprofit Current AI builds a free AI web for everyone

A farmer in rural India snaps a photo of a wilting plant on her phone. She wants to look up information about it online, but she does not speak English. The reality is, she should not have to.

That scenario captures the mission of Current AI, a nonprofit building open, public AI infrastructure to serve everyone. At the India AI Summit in February, the organization partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The collaboration produced Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles.” This pocket-sized, offline device runs AI across 22 Indian languages without needing an internet connection. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch. The device is open-source, allowing developer communities to build on it.

Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the nonprofit has moved quickly. Last month, it distributed $3.2 million in grants to four organizations. Just last week at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, it launched an open-source AI chatbot.

Bdeir joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of children before selling to Sphero in 2019.

Current AI operates as a public-private partnership, uniting governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest technology, Bdeir explained. The French government seeded the organization with $100 million, and the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce have joined, pushing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.

The core problem is clear: 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,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”

Half of the world’s spoken languages face extinction. “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” she added.

When asked about Big Tech’s push into multilingual AI, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are tangible. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she explained.

The issue goes beyond language. An AI’s ability to speak a language is only one piece of the puzzle. “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,” Bdeir said.

Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities retain control over their own data.

The nonprofit’s first grant round, announced last month, deployed $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. In Kenya, Masakhane 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 and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases controlled by communities, not tech companies. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

On data ownership, Bdeir did not hold back. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,” she told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach stores models and data locally. It brings in community experts before anything is built and writes consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.

None of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved the data ownership question yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.”

As for how much progress a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations can achieve, Bdeir rejected the Big Tech mindset. “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.”

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current 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. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power.

Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack designed to support the Japanese language and culture, as well as communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.