Current AI marshals $400M for public AI infrastructure push

Ayah Bdeir, who joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy, now runs a nonprofit that has pulled together $400 million in committed funding for what its backers call a public alternative to closed AI. TechCrunch reports the pot was seeded by $100 million from the French government and topped up by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. The framing Bdeir uses is deliberately old-internet: if AI is going to change every aspect of everyone's life, "there has to be a public alternative. Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free."

The interesting part is that this is not a white paper. Current AI, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, has actually shipped things. In February at the India AI Summit it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, to build Suno Sutra, Hindi for "listening chronicles," a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet required. Earlier this month in Geneva, at the AI for Good Summit, the nonprofit launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Last month it also cut $3.2 million in grants to four organizations working on multilingual data and AI accountability in Kenya, Lebanon, and Brazil.

Why this matters if you are not in policy circles: the argument that AI should be a public good has mostly been rhetorical. A nonprofit with $400 million in commitments, a national government as anchor sponsor, and two shipped artifacts in a matter of months is the first version of that argument with a real delivery cadence. It also gives other governments an on-ramp to back open infrastructure without having to build it themselves.

The honest caveat is that $400 million is committed, not spent, and the reporting does not break out draw-down schedules, per-project budgets, or how Alpha Chat performs against the paid chatbots people actually use. A seven-week build with ten partners is fast, and fast plus multi-org usually means the hard parts (evaluation, safety, ongoing maintenance) come due later. The part worth watching is whether other governments follow France's $100 million lead, because that is the point at which public AI stops being a slogan and starts being an alternative.