The Underdog Returns
Mozilla is back in fighting mode. The nonprofit organization that brought us Firefox and once took on Microsoft’s browser monopoly is now setting its sights on an even bigger target: the artificial intelligence industry’s most powerful players. From a snow-covered farm outside Toronto, Mozilla president Mark Surman is orchestrating what he calls an “AI rebel alliance” and he’s backing it with $1.4 billion.
It sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. But Surman isn’t joking around. He’s assembling a loose network of tech startups, developers, and public interest technologists who share a common goal: making AI more open, trustworthy, and accessible. Their mission? To check the growing power of industry heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic before a winner-takes-all scenario becomes reality.
“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 a recent interview. “It’s super corny, but people totally get it.”
David vs. Goliath: The Financial Reality
Let’s be real here. Mozilla is massively outgunned. In 2022, the organization launched Mozilla Ventures, a venture capital fund with an initial commitment of just $35 million for early-stage companies. That’s pocket change in today’s AI landscape.
OpenAI has raised more than $60 billion from investors across the globe. Anthropic has secured over $30 billion, according to PitchBook data. Tech giants like Google and Meta are spending tens of billions annually to build massive data centers and hire top AI researchers. OpenAI alone now sports a staggering $500 billion valuation.
Mozilla’s $1.4 billion in reserves? It’s barely a rounding error compared to what the big players are throwing around. In fact, that amount is roughly what it costs to run a single large language model training session these days.
But Surman isn’t trying to match them dollar-for-dollar. He’s betting on a completely different approach one that prioritizes collaboration over consolidation, openness over proprietary systems, and mission-driven values over pure profit.
What Went Wrong at OpenAI?
Mozilla represents a growing faction in the AI industry that’s genuinely worried about what OpenAI has become. When OpenAI launched as a nonprofit AI lab back in 2015, its stated mission was crystal clear: 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.”
That was the promise. But then ChatGPT happened.
The chatbot’s launch in late 2022 transformed everything. OpenAI morphed from an idealistic nonprofit into a commercial juggernaut with astronomical growth rates. The company completed a recapitalization in October 2025 that cemented its future as a for-profit business operating under a nonprofit umbrella a structure that actually resembles Mozilla’s own setup, though the similarities end there.
Only a handful of OpenAI’s original co-founders remain at the company today. Several early employees who left have been sharply critical of what they describe as a dangerous shift: growth prioritized over safety. Among the loudest critics is co-founder Elon Musk, who departed in 2018, launched a competitor called xAI in 2023, and is now suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for alleged breach of contract. OpenAI has dismissed Musk’s legal efforts as part of a “campaign of harassment,” and the case is expected to head to trial in April.
The Rebel Alliance Takes Shape
So what exactly is Mozilla building? According to a strategic report released in January 2026, the organization is deploying its reserves to support “mission-driven” tech businesses and nonprofits. The focus is on investments that promote AI transparency and can potentially counterbalance companies growing at breakneck speed with minimal oversight.
Mozilla Ventures has already invested in more than 55 companies to date, with dozens focused specifically on AI. More deals are planned for 2026. The portfolio includes some fascinating players:
Trail, a German startup, offers AI governance solutions for regulated enterprises. Co-founder Anna Spitznagel says her company raised a pre-seed round in 2024 with participation from Mozilla. The two organizations are exploring ways to collaborate more closely, potentially by building an open-source framework.
Transformer Lab, founded in 2024, is building open-source tools that developers can use to build, train, and evaluate advanced AI models. The company has fewer than 10 employees, mostly based in Canada, and hasn’t publicly disclosed its funding yet.
Oumi operates an open-source platform that researchers and engineers can use to train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy AI models. CEO Manos Koukoumidis spent about a decade working in AI at Microsoft, Facebook, and most recently Google before becoming disillusioned with the future he was helping to build.
Not Everyone’s Buying the Rebel Narrative
Here’s the thing, though. Mozilla’s “rebel alliance” framing isn’t landing with everyone not even some of the startups it’s backing.
Anna Spitznagel from Trail called it a “fun analogy” but said she’s not completely sold on the concept. “Rebel is a word that for me, personally, it has the wrong association,” she told CNBC. “I do think about AI a bit differently, but I also want to be part of the revolution that actually enables us to deploy AI and not hinder it.”
Tony Salomone and Ali Asaria, co-founders of Transformer Lab, are similarly on the fence. “I’m not gonna lie, I sometimes talk that way to get people kind of excited or engaged in our way of thinking,” Salomone admitted. But Asaria acknowledged there’s definitely a loose ecosystem of smaller AI companies that keep in touch and regularly cross paths at conferences. “There’s definitely a group of folks who are interested in this idea of trying to be sustainable companies that can have an impact on the industry and have an appreciation for AI, but don’t want to see just a few big companies win,” he said.
The Political Headwinds
Mozilla’s uphill battle gets even steeper when you factor in politics. The Trump administration is determined to maintain America’s AI dominance over China, and it’s been quick to lash out at anyone perceived as a potential threat to that agenda.
David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as the administration’s AI and crypto czar, accused Anthropic of supporting “woke AI” in October 2025 due to its approach on regulation. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in December establishing a single regulatory framework for AI and creating a litigation task force to challenge state AI laws particularly those led by Democratic lawmakers.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed back in a blog post, noting that his company had increased its revenue run rate from $1 billion to $7 billion in just nine months “and we’ve managed to do this while deploying AI thoughtfully and responsibly.”
But the message from Washington is clear: move fast, stay ahead of China, and don’t let safety concerns slow you down. That’s a tough environment for Mozilla’s mission-driven approach.
The Harsh Reality of Competing
When Transformer Lab’s team set out to raise funding in Silicon Valley and Canada, they heard the same thing over and over: it was going to be “technically impossible” for them to compete with the big players.
“When you enter into the space of AI as a new startup, it’s scary, because these few companies control so much more than just the intellectual property,” Asaria explained. They control funding. They control access to infrastructure. “It’s very hard to just walk into the space without starting with $100 million or a billion dollars.”
Oumi’s Koukoumidis knows that pain firsthand. Leaving a high-paying job at Google to join a startup was “intimidating,” he said. He has substantially fewer resources at his disposal now. But he’s convinced the tech giants are vulnerable. “Even the couple thousand people that are at OpenAI, Anthropic or anywhere else, because they’re operating in a silo, they’re not enough to advance this technology sufficiently, safely, cost efficiently, sustainably,” Koukoumidis told CNBC. “What’s happening right now, it’s complete insanity. We’re wasting billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions.”
Mozilla’s Long Game
Surman knows he’s playing the long game here. By 2028, Mozilla wants to be funding a growing open-source AI ecosystem that’s becoming “mainstream” for developers. The organization is targeting 20% annual growth in non-search revenue over the next few years a metric designed to prove that Mozilla’s approach can be economically viable while staying true to its mission.
“For many people, the idea that open-source AI can win, or this rebel alliance, that those players can actually take a piece of the market, they find it hard to believe,” Surman said. “But there’s a bunch of trends that are underway.”
While Mozilla’s biggest priority remains growing and investing in Firefox, supporting the rebel alliance is now “at the heart of who Mozilla is today,” according to the organization’s recent report. It’s not just about making investments it’s about building an alternative vision for AI’s future.
The Winner-Takes-All Problem
Surman is particularly concerned about what he calls the “winner-takes-all” mentality lurking behind even the big companies’ open-source efforts. Yes, tech giants like Google and Meta contribute to open-source communities and manage various open-source projects. But Surman warns that those same companies will “eat you if you’re not careful.”
Koukoumidis shares that concern. He’s “very confident” that the big tech companies are “taking a lot of shortcuts” when it comes to safety. That’s why he believes a much larger community of researchers and entrepreneurs should be collaborating to advance AI—which is exactly what platforms like Oumi are trying to enable.
A History of Fighting Giants
Mozilla has been here before. The organization has used “rebel alliance” language since at least 2020, when it published a report dedicated to “tens of thousands of people around the globe who believe in Mozilla.” In the 2024 State of Mozilla report, Surman invoked the phrase to describe the coalition of players that helped disrupt Microsoft’s web dominance in the early 2000s.
Mozilla took on Microsoft in the browser wars and survived. It competed with Apple and Google in the years that followed and stayed independent. The nonprofit is right at home playing the underdog role.
But AI is different. It moves faster. It costs more. And the window for alternatives is closing rapidly.
Can the Rebels Actually Win?
That’s the billion-dollar question or in this case, the $1.4 billion question. Mozilla is making a calculated bet that open-source collaboration can compete with Big AI’s billions. With a portfolio of 55+ startups and counting, Surman’s rebel alliance is small but strategic, targeting the cracks in OpenAI and Anthropic’s winner-takes-all approach.
The challenge isn’t just financial. It’s cultural, political, and technical all at once. Mozilla needs to prove that mission-driven AI can be commercially viable. It needs to show that a network of smaller players can move faster than industry giants who might be cutting corners on safety. And it needs to demonstrate that there’s still room for alternatives before market consolidation locks everything in.
Surman remains undeterred. He believes Mozilla can help “do for AI what we did for the web.” “There is an alternative that’s real and is emerging, and it’s a lot of small pieces that add up to that alternative,” he said. “The people in it are hungry to look where there’s weak spots in the current market and take advantage of them.”
The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher
By 2028, we’ll know if Mozilla’s bet paid off or if the rebels got crushed by the Empire’s war chest. The stakes are existential for Mozilla’s vision of an open, accessible internet. If a handful of companies end up controlling AI development, they’ll effectively control the next generation of the internet itself.
That’s what makes this fight so important. Mozilla isn’t just competing for market share. It’s fighting for a fundamentally different vision of how AI should be developed, who should have access to it, and who should benefit from it.
From his snow-covered farm outside Toronto, surrounded by cats, a dog, and soon some donkeys, Mark Surman is betting that vision still has a chance. The rebel alliance might be outgunned and outspent, but if Mozilla’s history has taught us anything, it’s that the underdog sometimes wins.
The question is whether $1.4 billion and a network of mission-driven startups can move the needle in an industry where that’s the cost of a single training run. Mozilla’s betting it can rally enough developers, startups, and researchers before the window shuts for good.
Time will tell if the Force is with them.
