France seeds $100m in $400m open-source AI network
A Paris-backed nonprofit is building free, public AI infrastructure to break the dominance of private US tech giants over global data and languages.
Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February, has secured $400 million in committed funding to build a free, public AI infrastructure. The French government provided a $100 million seed, joined by DeepMind, Salesforce, and major philanthropic foundations including Ford and MacArthur.
The initiative represents a direct European challenge to the proprietary ecosystem dominated by US giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. By treating AI as a digital public good, the Paris-backed project aims to establish an open stack where improvements benefit everyone and no single company controls the network.
The organization is deploying capital into specific, localized tools. In February, it partnered with the Indian government’s AI language division to launch Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without an internet connection. The hardware is entirely open-sourced for developers to build upon.
Last month, Current AI allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. These projects focus on building AI datasets in over 50 African languages for agriculture and health, and digitizing Arab cultural history into machine-readable databases controlled by communities rather than tech companies.
At the AI for Good Summit in Geneva last week, the nonprofit launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in just seven weeks. A coalition of ten organizations, including French startup Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, contributed different pieces of the technical stack, from language models to computing power.
Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, argues that commercial AI systems leave most of the world's cultures behind. "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."
Data sovereignty is central to this model. Bdeir noted that Big Tech builds multilingual models to expand markets "regardless of consent or context," pointing out that Indigenous Bible translations often become training data before communities establish their own rules. Current AI requires its grantees to store data locally and embed consent protocols that allow communities to halt the process at any time.
The nonprofit recently struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source stack for Japanese and Global South markets. "One thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier," Bdeir said.
