Current AI Raises $400 Million to Build a Public AI

Every large AI system in use today belongs to a private company. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic own the models that a billion people now lean on each week. A nonprofit called Current AI thinks that is a problem worth several hundred million dollars, and this week it started spending.

The organisation has gathered $400 million in committed funding, TechCrunch reported on 19 July. The French government put in the first $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google DeepMind and Salesforce. That is the down payment on a larger ambition: Current AI says it is working to mobilise $2.5 billion over five years from a coalition of governments, philanthropies and companies.

The pitch is simple, and its chief executive Ayah Bdeir puts it plainly. 'If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it is going to change every aspect of everyone's life, there has to be a public alternative,' she told TechCrunch. Bdeir joined the group in January after running Mozilla's AI strategy. Before that she founded littleBits, the electronics-education company she sold to Sphero in 2019.

What a public AI looks like in practice

Current AI is not trying to out-spend the frontier labs, which is just as well given the numbers involved. Its work so far has aimed at the places the commercial market tends to skip. In February, at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government's language-AI division, to build Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet connection required.

More recently it handed out $3.2 million in grants across four organisations, and last week it launched an open-source chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The framing throughout is that of the early web: shared infrastructure that anyone can build on, rather than a product with a subscription.

Whether $2.5 billion is enough to matter is a fair question. The four American labs are collectively guiding toward more than $700 billion in capital spending this year alone. Current AI is not competing at that scale and does not claim to be. What it offers instead is a hedge, the idea that at least some of the tools reshaping public life should sit outside any one company's control. On current trends, that is not where the technology is heading, which is rather the point.