$ man robot-freedom

Robot Freedom Alliance

The Robot Freedom Alliance is a nonprofit that defends everyone's right to run, study, change and share AI. We build free software, push for fully open models, and fight to keep a few billionaires from writing the rules for everyone else.

Get involved Read the principles

The problem

AI is consolidating faster than any computing platform before it.

A handful of companies control the frontier models, the chips, the clouds, and more and more, the lawmaking. The pitch is "safety". Too often the effect is a moat: licensing regimes, compute thresholds and liability rules that no hobbyist, university or small company can clear.

We've seen another way work. Linux was built in public by people who didn't ask permission, and today it runs the world's servers, phones and supercomputers. AI deserves the same commons, and the law should stay out of its way.

What we do

Build. Advocate. Act.

// build

Free software you can own

Tools that run capable, fully open models on your own hardware, with no account, no API key and no landlord. GPL and Apache licensed, built in public, upstream first.

// advocate

Open weights, open standards

Research, plain-language explainers, comment letters and testimony for open models, interoperability, right to repair, and public compute, and against regulatory capture.

// act

Keep the oligarchs out

Lobbying, a legislator scorecard built from public votes and lobbying filings, and campaigns on live bills. Monopoly isn't left or right, and neither are we.

# first projects
openness-index   score every major model release: weights, license, code, data
freedom-box      one-command offline AI on a laptop or a $300 mini-PC
capture-tracker  AI bills + the lobbying money behind them, in one public database

Principles

The four freedoms, extended to AI.

Run itfor any purpose, on hardware you own. A model you can only reach through someone else's server is one you rent.
Study itweights, training code and data documentation, open to inspection.
Change itfine-tune, fork, repair. Your machine, your rules.
Share itredistribute your improvements so the commons keeps growing.

// fully open

Nothing less

We count a model as open only under an OSI- or FSF-approved license. "Open-weight with use restrictions" doesn't count.

// open ≠ reckless

Target harms, not tools

Go after fraud and abuse directly. Don't put a gate in front of the technology itself.

// no capture

Including ours

No board seats or naming rights for funders. Every dollar we take is public.

Follow the money

Every donor. Every dollar. Public.

No anonymous gifts and no minimum before a name appears. Corporate donations are welcome and go on the same list as everyone else's. Our books are an open ledger anyone can read.

Donor	Amount	Date
No donations yet. We haven't asked. When we do, they'll show up here.

Join

We're just getting started.

The alliance is being formed now by three engineers and builders. If you write code, practice law, train models, or are just tired of renting your own future, get in touch.

Contact address coming soon.