Sentient Foundation Commits $42 Million to ensure AGI remains open, decentralized, and aligned with humanity's interests.
Not a vague pledge. A live grant and investment program. Open right now.
Here's the thesis behind it.
A handful of labs are quietly turning intelligence into a metered utility. You pay per token. You get what they let you have. They decide what the model knows, how it thinks, and who it serves.
This is OPEC of intelligence. Meter it, price it, ration it.
The $42M is the answer to that. The answer to life, the universe, and now to who controls AGI.
Two tracks. One application.
Grant track: for researchers, open source maintainers, indie developers, and public goods builders. No equity. No claim on your work. You keep everything you make.
Investment track: for teams building real businesses on open source AI. Founder-friendly terms. Help scaling, with openness baked in as a condition, not an afterthought.
The bar to qualify is lower than you think. You do not have to open source your entire stack. One essential piece has to be openly available and actually matter to how the project works and spreads. That is it.
They review on a rolling basis. Technical merit, ecosystem impact, openness, long-term potential.
The part that makes this more than a press release is who showed up for the launch. Alibaba Cloud. Franklin Templeton. Princeton University. The Indian Institute of Science.
That is a cloud giant, a trillion-dollar asset manager, and two of the most serious research institutions on Earth, all standing behind open AGI on day one.
This is one of the largest commitments ever made purely to keeping AGI open.
Think about the timing. Open models are catching up fast. DeepSeek and Qwen already proved an open model can trade blows with the closed ones. The gap is closing every month.
The question stops being can open source compete. It becomes who funds the people doing it before the window shuts.
Money is the honest answer. Maintainers burn out because nobody pays them. Researchers go closed because that is where the checks are. Public goods stay underfunded because there is no exit.
$42M with no equity strings is a direct shot at that problem.
If you build in the open, this is for you.
If you are sitting on a repo, a paper, a model, or a tool that keeps any part of AGI accessible to people who are not paying rent for it, you should apply.
Apply here: sentient.foundation/grants
The future of intelligence gets built by the many or controlled by the few.
This is the many getting funded.
Link
Open Source AGI Grant Programme | Sentient Foundation
The most important technology ever built is being locked behind closed doors. We are funding the builders who will keep it open.
sentient.foundation
Sentient Foundation (@sentient_found)
The Sentient Foundation is committing $42M through its Open Source AGI Grant for those building and leveraging AGI in the open.
We designed the program to grow an ecosystem where critical AI remains openly accessible, enabling developers, researchers, and companies worldwide to build, innovate, and scale.
Launching with our ecosystem partners Alibaba Cloud, Franklin Templeton, Princeton University, and the Indian Institute of Science, as part of our mission to keep artificial general intelligence open, decentralized, and aligned with humanity's interests.
Video
— https://nitter.net/sentient_found/status/2069782607953539560#m