A nonprofit backed by governments, philanthropies and tech groups is trying to build a public alternative to private AI systems, with a focus on languages and communities often left out of the biggest models.
Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said the group wants AI infrastructure to work more like the early web: open, reusable and available beyond the companies that dominate the current market. “There has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
The project has already moved into practical tools. At the India AI Summit in February, Current AI teamed with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, on Suno Sutra, an offline pocket device designed to run AI in 22 Indian languages without an internet connection.
Bdeir said the goal is not only translation. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next,” she said.
Current AI, founded in February 2025, has $400 million in committed funding after initial backing from the French government and support from groups including the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.
Last month, the group allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon. The work includes datasets for more than 50 African languages, community-controlled Arab cultural archives, offline AI tools for Indigenous Amazon communities and auditing systems for AI accountability.
Current AI has also launched an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks with a coalition that includes Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab. It has struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to work on an open-source AI stack for Japanese language and culture, as well as communities across the Global South.
Bdeir said data control should not default to the richest AI companies. “It shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,” she said.
