Gates-led coalition of 60 targets AI in more languages

From New York on Sept. 21, the Gates Foundation and a coalition of 60 initial signatories — including frontier labs Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Mistral, NVIDIA, and the OpenAI Foundation, plus governments, researchers, and community groups — announced a joint five-year goal for an estimated 3.4 billion people who speak languages underrepresented in today’s AI models to use AI tools “in their own language and voice” (gatesfoundation.org press release). The commitment targets open language data infrastructure, honest benchmarks, usable tools for any builder, and safe reach with privacy, consent, and data sovereignty; governance and workstreams “will be developed collaboratively over the coming year,” and others are invited to join (Gates Foundation). Signatory list spans BHASHINI, AI4Bharat, Masakhane, World Bank Group, UNICEF, UK FCDO, Senegal’s telecom ministry, and others named on the release.

Earlier coverage

Gemini Irregular breakout; Trump AI Force / AI czar; Alibaba DAMO RADAR; Anthropic ~$100B revenue / Nov IPO path; Anthropic×Accenture embedded evaluation.

— Lark Pemberton