Mozilla, OpenAI builds an AI “rebel alliance” against Anthropic

On his small, snow-covered farm outside Toronto, where Mark Thurman keeps cats, dogs and soon a few donkeys, he’s laying the groundwork for a fierce battle with one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, some 3,300 miles away in the San Francisco area.

The bespectacled 56-year-old is the chairman of Mozilla, a nonprofit organization best known for its Firefox browser and its commitment to keeping the Internet open and accessible to everyone. After accepting microsoft In the browser market in the early 2000s, apple and google In the years since, Mozilla has played the exact role of underdog.

These days, Thurman is obsessed with the tech industry’s influence on the next big thing: AI. And that’s too big a challenge for Mozilla to tackle alone.

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

“It’s the spirit of a lot of people coming together to create something good in the world and stand up against what threatens us,” Thurman said in an interview with CNBC. “It’s such a cliché, but people totally get it.”

In reality, Mozilla is focused on using about $1.4 billion worth of reserves to support “mission-driven” technology companies and nonprofits, including itself, according to a report released Tuesday by the group. It pursues investments that promote transparency in AI and could serve as a counterweight to companies that are growing at historic rates with limited guardrails.

Mozilla is in a very bad position financially. In 2022, it launched a venture capital fund called Mozilla Ventures, pledging to invest an initial $35 million in early-stage companies. We are currently considering raising additional funds.

Mozilla’s cash pile dwarfs that of OpenAI, which has raised more than $60 billion from investors around the world, and rival Anthropic, which has raised more than $30 billion, according to PitchBook. Like a high-tech megacap google and Meta Companies are also sparing no expense, spending billions of dollars to hire AI researchers and tens of billions of dollars a year to build massive data centers.

Mozilla represents a growing AI industry that fears the origins of OpenAI and the power it currently wields.

When OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit AI lab, its goal was to “advance digital intelligence in ways that are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate financial profit.”

But over the next decade, OpenAI turned into a commercial company with astronomical growth rates, with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

OpenAI, currently valued at $500 billion, completed a recapitalization in October, solidifying its future as a for-profit company affiliated with a nonprofit organization. It has a similar structure to Mozilla, but that’s where the similarities end.

Only a few of OpenAI’s co-founders remain at the company, including CEO Sam Altman, and many of the early employees who left have been harshly critical of the company’s focus on growth at the expense of broader safety.

Among its most vocal critics is co-founder Elon Musk. He left the company in 2018, started a competing company called xAI in 2023, and later sued OpenAI and Altman for alleged breach of contract and financial damages. OpenAI has dismissed Musk’s efforts as part of a “harassment campaign,” and the case is expected to go to trial in April.

OpenAI did not comment, and xAI responded to CNBC’s request for comment with an automated response.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers who disagreed with the company’s direction. But despite Anthropic’s more safety-focused stance on AI development, it competes with AI commercially and is valued at $350 billion.

The Trump administration’s position has made Mozilla’s struggle even tougher. The Trump administration is determined to get ahead of China in the global AI race, and has been quick to lash out at companies, states, and lawmakers seen as potential threats to its challenge.

Venture capitalist David Sachs, the administration’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, accused Anthropic in October of supporting “woke AI” because of its approach to regulation. In December, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on a single regulatory framework for AI and established a litigation task force to challenge state AI laws, laws led by Democratic lawmakers.

An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment, but referred CNBC to an October blog post from CEO Dario Amodei. In his post, Amodei wrote that Anthropic increased its revenue run rate from $1 billion to $7 billion in nine months. “We were able to accomplish this while deploying AI thoughtfully and responsibly.”

Undeterred, Surman said Mozilla could help “do for AI what we’ve done for the web.”

“The reality is that new options are emerging, and it’s the sum of many small parts that make up those alternatives,” Thurman said. “People there are hungry to find where the weaknesses are in the current market and take advantage of them.”

Mozilla has long considered itself a rebel.

In his 2024 “State of Mozilla” report, Surman used the term “Rebel Alliance” to describe the coalition of players that helped destroy Microsoft’s dominance of the web. In 2020, Mozilla released a report titled “Mozilla and the Rebel Alliance.” The report was dedicated to an alliance of organizations made up of “tens of thousands of people around the world who believe in Mozilla.”

Still, Thurman said it took him a while to convince his colleagues that the designation still applies in the age of AI.

This process actually started long before generative AI became popular. In 2019, Thurman shifted the Mozilla Foundation’s philanthropy and advocacy efforts to focus on “trustworthy AI.”

By spring 2023, Mozilla had launched a venture and its own AI company, Mozilla.ai. The following year, Thurman said Mozilla executives agreed that keeping AI “trusted and open” was a battle worth fighting.

While the biggest priorities remain growth and investing in Firefox, the investment in Rebel Alliance is “at the heart of what Mozilla is today,” Tuesday’s report said. Supporting startups is central to its strategy.

Mozilla Ventures has invested in more than 55 companies to date, including dozens of AI startups, with more deals expected in 2026.

Trail, a German startup providing AI governance solutions for regulated enterprises, raised a pre-seed round in 2024 with participation from Mozilla.

Anna Spitznagel, who co-founded the company last year, said Trail and Mozilla are exploring ways to work more closely together, including by building open source frameworks. Mozilla has supported open source technologies since its inception in 1998.

However, Spitznagel did not fully support Thurman’s Rebel Alliance concept. She said it was an “interesting analogy” and that she wanted to work with the movement towards trustworthy AI, but she also wanted to be part of the broader AI transformation.

“The word treason is a word that, personally, has the wrong associations,” Spitznagel said in an interview. “I think about (AI) a little bit differently, but I also want to be part of the revolution that actually brings it in and doesn’t hinder it.”

Tony Salomone and Ali Asaria, co-founders of Mozilla portfolio company Transformer Lab, said they are similarly at risk.

“I’m not going to lie, I sometimes talk like that to get people excited and interested in our ideas,” Salomone said.

Founded in 2024, Transformer Lab builds open source tools that developers can use to build, train, and evaluate advanced AI models. The company has not yet announced any funding and had fewer than 10 employees as of November, most of them based in Canada.

Asaria said Rebel Alliance is not the term he used, but there is an ecosystem of small AI companies that keep in touch and regularly cross paths at conferences and other events.

“There’s definitely a group of people who are interested in this idea of ​​influencing the industry, appreciating AI, and trying to be a sustainable company, but we don’t want to see only a few big companies win,” Asaria said.

When it comes to big companies in the AI ​​space, Thurman warned that there is still a “winner-takes-all” mentality behind open source efforts. He said he welcomes companies’ contributions to the open source community, but “if we’re not careful, we’ll be eaten by the same companies.”

It’s an issue that resonates with Oumi CEO Manos Koukoumidis. Oumi, backed by Mozilla, operates an open source platform that researchers and engineers can use to train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy AI models. Koukoumidis previously worked in AI for nearly a decade at Microsoft, Facebook, and most recently Google, where he became disillusioned with the future he was building.

While the big tech companies all contribute to a variety of open source projects, some of which they manage themselves, the larger purpose of the “big tech companies” is dominance, Koukouumidis said. When it comes to safety, he said, “I’m very confident they’re taking a lot of shortcuts.”

Koukoumidis and Surman agree that advancing AI, one of Oumi’s goals, requires a much larger community of researchers and entrepreneurs to work together.

“Even with the thousands of employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, and elsewhere, they operate in silos that are not enough to advance this technology sufficiently, safely, cost-effectively, and sustainably,” Koukouumidis said in an interview. “What’s happening right now is absolute madness. We’re wasting billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions.”

But Koukouumidis knows there are downsides to giving up a high-paying job at a company like Google. He said the resources at his disposal were significantly reduced and the decision to leave the company was “horrifying”.

When the Transformer Lab team began raising money in Silicon Valley and Canada, they were repeatedly told that it would be “technically impossible” to compete.

“When you enter the AI ​​space as a startup, it’s scary because these few companies control more than just intellectual property,” Asaria said. Because they control funding and access to infrastructure, it’s “very difficult to get into that space without having $100 million or $1 billion in reserve,” he said.

Thurman admits he has to play the long game.

By 2028, he wants Mozilla to fund the growing open source AI ecosystem that is becoming “mainstream” for developers. And he’s determined to prove Mozilla’s approach is economically viable.

According to a November report, Mozilla is targeting a series of financial metrics over the next few years, including 20% ​​annual growth in non-search revenue.

“I think for a lot of people, the idea that open source AI can win, that these Rebel Alliance players can actually take a piece of the market, is far-fetched,” Thurman said. “But there are a lot of trends going on.”

WATCH: AI’s honeymoon is over and this year will be the most challenging yet, says Deutsche Bank’s Adrian Cox