We fund what the market won't.
Many initiatives that expand opportunity, increase inclusivity, and center the needs of people will never attract commercial funding. These initiatives are in fact precisely what big tech is structured to ignore.
Current AI's granting program exists to make sure this essential work happens, while creating optimal conditions for cross-pollination to level up the entire ecosystem.
Our Granting Program
We distribute funds through grants for a few strategic reasons.
Grantmaking galvanizes collaboration, not competition.
Grantmaking requires open documentation, ensuring the work we support builds collective momentum and cross-pollinates the public-goods ecosystem.
Grantmaking protects community control over their own cultural knowledge.
We measure success through individual wins as much as we do through learnings developed via setbacks.
Grantmaking lets us multiply funding.
By bringing public and private funders together around the same table, we’re able to make a larger investment than any one funder could commit alone.
What we fund
Common, shared tools that function as AI public goods (think datasets, models, compute, audits, applications, and documentation)
Community-owned infrastructure with participatory governance
Products that reach end users and confer agency
Resourceful, low-cost solutions that work despite limited electricity, capital, and connectivity
Projects that produce innovations that become usable across the whole AI value chain
What we don't fund
Closed or proprietary systems, or architectures that create vendor lock-in
Extractive data practices without community ownership
Work that can't demonstrate a commitment to auditability and transparency
Research papers or policy briefs without an auditable technical work product
Efforts with no cross-pollination potential or learning for the broader movement
Cultural Preservation
While linguistic diversity in AI has begun to gain traction, the oral traditions, knowledge systems, spiritual practices, social structures, and lived epistemologies that give language its meaning remain almost entirely absent from how AI is trained, governed, and deployed. Much of this knowledge was never digitized. It lives in manuscripts, local media, embodied life, and living memory, and is invisible to AI by default.
The result is AI that reflects only some of the world's knowledge, and almost none of its diversity.
We believe that by supporting builders developing open, high-quality, culturally grounded AI infrastructure (from datasets and local models to applications, physical devices and governance tools), communities can shape their own ethical, auditable, and culturally rich AI futures
For 2026, we have committed over $10M to deploy across two rounds of Cultural Preservation grantees.
Who we fund
We support builders developing open and auditable technology, not research, policy, or regulation work. When seeking applications, we encourage applicants from regions that have typically been excluded from AI's development.
Rather than funding in silos, we fund cohorts that can cross-pollinate and lift each other up. We review applications with the full cohort in mind, aiming for diversity across cultures, geographies, and stages of growth.
Typical 2026 grants range between $100k and $500k, with projects that can become open hubs, frameworks, or platforms to build on receiving larger grants.
What we look for
Ecosystem impact
We look for teams who value sharing, connecting, and contributing to the broader field, across regions and additional sectors.
Openness
Ideally a dataset, model, tool, or documented methodology will be contributed to the commons. (Note that “open source” does not mean surrendering community ownership. We value data sovereignty and the right of communities to determine how their knowledge is shared and used.)
Frugal AI
We appreciate solutions that work under real-world constraints. This is central to what public-interest AI means in practice, not what it means in a well-resourced lab.
Let’s Build Together
While we’re not accepting proposals at this time, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter (below) to learn more about Current AI, to be informed about our next call for proposals.