A $400M Nonprofit Backed by France and DeepMind is Building AI’s ‘Public Option’
Every big AI model belongs to a private company. A nonprofit backed by France, DeepMind and Salesforce wants to build a free, public alternative, and it has just started spending.
July 20, 2026 – 1:01 pm
Image by: Current AI
A farmer in rural India photographs a dying plant and wants to look it up. She does not speak English, and today’s AI barely speaks hers. A non-profit called Current AI thinks that is a problem worth fixing.
Its goal is grand: a “public option” for AI, open and free to anyone, much like the early web. "If it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” chief executive Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch. "Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free."
Who is behind it
Current AI launched at France’s AI Action Summit in early 2025. The French government seeded it with €100m, joined by the Ford and MacArthur foundations, DeepMind and Salesforce. Total commitments now top $400m, and the group says it is aiming to mobilise $2.5bn over five years.
Crucially, the backers are not chasing a return. “They’re not investors, they’re funders,” Bdeir said. She ran Mozilla’s AI strategy before joining, and earlier founded the education-hardware firm littleBits.
The Pitch
The pitch leans on a European instinct for a public alternative to American platforms. It sits in the same space as state-led efforts to build public AI infrastructure, but as a global movement rather than one country’s project.
Starting with language
Its first focus is the world’s languages. Half of those spoken today are at risk of dying out, and English dominates the big models. Bdeir argues that leaves most of the world’s cultures out of AI entirely.
She is blunt about how Big Tech fills the gap. Firms build multilingual models “to expand their market, regardless of consent or context,” she said. For some Indigenous languages, she noted, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have agreed to anything.
Current AI’s answer is to build with communities, not just for them, and to keep the data local. In India, it worked with the government’s language unit on Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet. It is open-sourced for others to build on.
Money on the Table
The spending has started, though it is modest so far. Last month the group handed $3.2m in first grants to four organisations in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.
The projects range from datasets for 50-plus African languages to offline tools that keep Indigenous Amazon data inside the territory, plus audit tools to hold AI systems to account. Bdeir admits they have not yet fully cracked the question of who owns the data, but she counts building the question in as the point.
Assembling a Stack
The bigger bet is a full open stack, from chips to apps. This month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot based on publicly available code.