Mozilla building an AI ‘rebel alliance’ to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

From his small, snow-covered farm outside Toronto, home to cats and a dog, and soon some donkeys, Mark Surman has been laying the groundwork for a fierce battle with the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, located about 2,300 miles away in the San Francisco area.

The bespectacled 56-year-old is president of Mozilla, a nonprofit organization best known for its Firefox browser and a pledge to keep the internet open and accessible to all. Having taken on Microsoft in the browser market in the early 2000s, and Apple and Google in the years that followed, Mozilla is right at home playing the role of underdog.

These days, Surman is preoccupied with the tech industry’s influence over the next big thing: AI. And it’s too big of a challenge for Mozilla to tackle on its own.

Surman is building what he’s described as “a rebel alliance of sorts,” using a phrase that’s long been part of Mozilla’s lexicon. In this case, the alliance is a loose network of tech startups, developers and public interest technologists committed to making AI more open and trustworthy and to checking the power of industry heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic.

“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 in an interview. “It’s super corny, but people totally get it.”

In practice, Mozilla is focused on deploying its roughly $1.4 billion worth of reserves to support “mission driven” tech businesses and nonprofits, including its own, according to a report the organization released Tuesday. It’s pursuing investments that promote AI transparency, and can potentially act as a counterforce to companies that are growing at historic rates with limited guardrails.

Financially, Mozilla is at a massive disadvantage. In 2022, it launched a venture capital fund called Mozilla Ventures and pledged to invest an initial $35 million in early-stage companies. It’s now exploring raising additional funds.    

Mozilla’s cash pile is dwarfed by OpenAI, which has raised more than $60 billion from investors across the globe, and its rival Anthropic, which has raised more than $30 billion, according to PitchBook. Tech megacaps like Google and Meta are also sparing no expense, shelling out billions of dollars to hire AI researchers and tens of billions a year to build out massive data centers. 

Mozilla represents a growing swath of the AI industry that’s afraid of what OpenAI has become and the power that it now wields.

When OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit AI lab in 2015, its stated goal was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…