Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025, has launched an open‑source device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without an internet connection and an open‑source chatbot released at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The organization says it is building a public‑interest AI infrastructure that anyone can use at no cost.

The nonprofit says the existing AI market is dominated by private companies, creating a language gap that leaves many spoken languages underrepresented. CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, said that a public alternative is needed if AI is to be transformative for all people.

Current AI has committed $400 million in funding, including $100 million from the French government, and contributions from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce. It has allocated $3.2 million in grants to four projects in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.

The funded projects include Masakhane in Kenya, which will develop AI datasets for health, agriculture and education in more than 50 African languages; the Institute for Worldmaking in Lebanon, which is digitizing Arab cultural history for community control; Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil, which is creating offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities; and the African Internet Rights Alliance in Kenya, which will build audit tools for AI accountability across the continent.

On data ownership, Bdeir said that data should not be owned solely by a Silicon Valley company, and that Current AI’s approach stores models and data locally, engages community experts early, and includes consent mechanisms that allow communities to pause development.

Earlier this month Current AI 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. The organization also entered a partnership with Sakana AI, a Tokyo‑based startup focused on sovereign AI, to build a shared open‑source AI stack that supports Japanese language and culture and can be used by communities in the Global South.

Bdeir said the initiative’s goal is to create an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone and communities retain control over their data.

The program aims to let an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon use a tool built in Kenya to share ecological knowledge in her own language.