Nonprofit Current AI launches open public AI infrastructure projects with $3.2M in grants

Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025, launched Alpha Chat, an open-source AI chatbot developed in seven weeks by a coalition including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. The chatbot is part of Current AI’s effort to build a public, globally inclusive AI ecosystem modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone and communities retain control of their data.

The nonprofit also announced an offline device called Suno Sutra, which runs AI in 22 Indian languages without requiring internet access. Suno Sutra was developed in partnership with Bhashini, India’s government AI language division, and is designed to address the lack of linguistic representation in AI systems, particularly for rural users who do not speak English.

Current AI allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and Brazil. The grantees include Masakhane in Kenya, which is building AI datasets for over 50 African languages focused on health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking, which is digitizing Arab cultural history into machine-readable databases controlled by communities; Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras, which is developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities; and Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance, which is creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

The nonprofit’s approach emphasizes local data ownership and community consent, with models and data stored locally and protocols written to allow communities to halt processes at any point. Current AI operates as a public-private partnership, with $400 million in committed funding from entities including the French government, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. These funders are described as funders, not investors, supporting public interest technology rather than profit-driven ventures.

Current AI’s CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January 2026 after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, framed the organization’s mission as a response to the dominance of private AI systems. She argued that transformative technologies like AI require public alternatives to ensure accessibility and prevent cultural exclusion, stating that Big Tech builds multilingual models primarily to expand markets rather than to address consent or context.