From a snow-covered farm outside Toronto, Mozilla president Mark Surman is assembling what he calls an AI "rebel alliance" - and he's backing it with $1.4 billion. The nonprofit behind Firefox just released a strategic report detailing plans to deploy its reserves into mission-driven startups and developers committed to open, trustworthy AI. It's a direct challenge to the concentrated power of OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised $60 billion and $30 billion respectively. Mozilla's betting that a network of smaller players can check the industry's heavyweights before winner-takes-all becomes reality.
Mozilla is done playing defense. The nonprofit that once took on Microsoft's browser monopoly is now picking a fight with the entire AI establishment - and this time, it's writing checks.
Mark Surman, Mozilla's 56-year-old president, laid out the battle plan in a report released Tuesday. The organization is deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to support what Surman calls a "rebel alliance" of startups, developers, and nonprofits committed to making AI more open and trustworthy. It's Mozilla's answer to an industry increasingly dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised more than $60 billion and $30 billion respectively, according to PitchBook.
"It's that spirit that a bunch of people are banding together to create something good in the world and take on this thing that threatens us," Surman told CNBC from his farm outside Toronto. "It's super corny, but people totally get it."
The stakes are existential for Mozilla's vision of the internet. When OpenAI launched as a nonprofit in 2015, its stated goal was to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But ChatGPT changed everything. OpenAI now carries a $500 billion valuation and completed a recapitalization in October that cemented its future as a for-profit business. Only a handful of co-founders remain, and critics - including departed co-founder Elon Musk, who's now suing the company - say safety took a backseat to growth.
