A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to do research on the internet but doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to.
That’s the kind of problem that a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building an open, public AI infrastructure. In February, the company partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language arm, at the India AI Summit. The result was Suno Sutra, Hindi for “audio chronicles,” a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without requiring an internet connection. “There are hundreds of different languages and dialects in India, and AI currently doesn’t represent them,” said current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open source and available for developer communities to build.
The non-profit organization, founded by Martin Tisné in February 2025, is moving quickly. Last month, $3.2 million in grants were awarded to projects at four organizations. Most recently (last week), an open source AI chatbot was presented at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva.
Bdeir joined 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,” bringing together governments, companies and charities to fund technologies of public interest, she told TechCrunch. The French government gave Current AI $100 million, along with the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce, bringing the total funding to $400 million. “They are not investors, they are funders,” Bdeir said.
The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, is now owned by a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology and is intended to change every aspect of every person’s life, there must be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to everyone for free.”
Half of the languages spoken worldwide are threatened with extinction. “And since English drives the largest language models and AI systems, a majority of the world’s languages, and therefore cultures and communities, are left behind,” Bdeir said.
When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Large technology companies are developing multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities set rules,” she said.
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Not just about language
An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is the way knowledge, tradition, memory and identity are passed from one generation to the next. So if a technology cannot speak your language, it cannot preserve your culture,” she said.
Their vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one is left out, and communities retain control of their own data.
Current’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, included providing $3.2 million to four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.
The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets in more than 50 African languages for health, agriculture and education. The Lebanese Institute for Worldmaking digitizes Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases controlled by communities (not tech companies). The Brazilian portal sem Porteiras develops offline AI tools with indigenous Amazon communities and stores data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.
Who owns the data?
When it came to the question of data ownership, Bdeir did not mince his words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in different communities, but one thing is certain: it shouldn’t be a Silicon Valley company trying to make a few thousand select people richer,” she told TechCrunch.
The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bring in community experts before anything is built, or write consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can stop the process at any time.
None of Current AI’s grantees have yet fully solved it. But Bdeir sees this as the crucial point. “Each of them has integrated the question into their work,” she said, “instead of accepting the usual default setting where complexity becomes an excuse to let one government or one tech company decide for everyone.”
As for the progress that can be made with a $3.2 million budget split between four organizations, Bdeir says: “Scale is not always scale. This 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 pass on ecological knowledge in his own language.”
Structure of the stack
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched AlphaChat, an open-source chatbot put together in seven weeks by a coalition of 10 organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought part of the stack, including a language model, security tools, and computing power.
Current AI has also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a joint open-source AI stack designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that have been largely ignored by dominant AI systems.
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/19/nonprofit-current-ai-is-racing-to-build-the-world-wide-web-of-ai-free-for-all/
