The Mozilla Foundation might be best known as the org behind Firefox, but these days, it’s recasting the same stance it brought to the Browser Wars for a new generation-defining technology.
The nonprofit is currently shifting its strategy and rebranding to put AI front and center as it pushes for more open-source ideals in the technology—and helps define what that even means, invests in startups that align with that goal, and builds its own AI tools.
The shakeup comes as open-source AI is having a moment. Upstart Chinese lab DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley with its purportedly ultra-efficient models released under an open-source license, prompting reconsideration of a debate that’s been brewing over the topic for years.
Mozilla laid off around 30% of its staff last year in a restructuring of its operations, but Mozilla Foundation President Mark Surman said the org’s advocacy goals haven’t changed. “The short answer is that this restructuring hasn’t affected Mozilla’s mission at all. Our mission remains the same: pushing for a positive and transparent future that puts people first,” Surman said in an email.
We talked with Surman about how Mozilla is changing, whether advocacy efforts might look different under a new administration, and what DeepSeek means for open-source.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about Mozilla’s strategy shift and rebrand?
I think of it as a dramatic evolution rather than a shift. The headline I have been using for the last year or so is that we’re trying to do for AI what we did for the web. And so what does that mean? It means that 20 years ago, as we got started, you had one company that had really kind of taken control of the web, which was Microsoft, and that mattered because that was the fundamental building block at the time and how you built anything digital.
And we’re now at a similar spot where a very small set of players are taking control of AI, and that is now the fundamental building block about how you build anything digital. And so we want to do what we did last time, in terms of, A, making sure that open-source wins, and B, in doing that, making sure that really fuels competition. I mean, it really was Web 2.0 that Firefox was a big part of creating that fueled a lot of the things that we use today, because you didn’t have to only build on top of Windows or on top of Internet Explorer. And so we really want a vibrant next era of AI. We think that open-source AI is going to be key to that, and we think Mozilla can be a player in making it possible.
So what that’s meant is we’ve had to start to transform Mozilla, which is the browser company and an advocacy organization at its heart, to being an organization that brings in more talent that is focused on AI, starts investing in other responsible tech startups that are focused on AI, and starts to also experiment with responsible AI in the context of Firefox. So that’s really what the shift is about.
Last year, we saw a finalized definition for open-source AI. What’s the next big project for the open-source AI push? And how are you looking to continue that work?
There’s a bunch of next big projects. Certainly one of the things in this shift is for Mozilla to go from just being something singular—most people think about Firefox—to a portfolio of different bets. One of those things is taking this Mozilla AI company that we started a couple of years ago and driving it toward making it easy for any developer—and I guess developers are becoming almost anybody—to be able to build the things they could today with ChatGPT or Claude, but build them with open-source. And so really, one of the next big bets is making the whole Lego box of open-source AI that’s emerging really easy for anybody to use.
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And then, adjacent to Firefox, as a Firefox item, we’ve launched something called Orbit, which is really taking a different approach to a chatbot in a browser that is privacy-focused, is really oriented toward something that helps you make sense of everything that’s happening on the web, but without having to go and share up all your data of what’s going on. You’ll see more and more of that privacy-centric AI-integrated Firefox and maybe even in Thunderbird, which is our email client. And so hopefully we can really show the way, in a way that Apple is trying to do with Apple Intelligence, but they’re trying to do it in a way that is only for people who use the fanciest of devices. And we think that privacy, private AI—AI that respects your privacy—is something that should be available to everyone. So that’s another big challenge for us to tackle, in addition to the open-source one.
And then the third thing is we see a real need for what we call public AI, in that there is a counterpoint to the big players and the centralization in the hands of a few companies, in the sense of public infrastructure that anybody can build on. You know, much like PBS is a complement to the commercial networks back in the day, we think there should be a public lane for AI.
Do you see DeepSeek and other Chinese models embracing open-source as positive developments? And do you think that could create more competition?
I do think it’s a positive development that you’re seeing highly performing open-source models, and I would also say America absolutely needs to invest more in its own open-source AI leaders. And so I would want to see money going to the Allen Institute for AI. I would want to see continued funding for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), which is a really key piece that has come out of the scientific side of the federal government, things that allow open-source to flourish in America—by American companies, American researchers, American research labs—are going to be critical to global competition.
With a new administration and a new Congress in Washington, how has the pitch that you’re making changed as you advocate for open-source AI?
It’s really just too early to tell. What is positive is a real interest in AI and innovation, and what we don’t know yet is, is that going to be an interest that is focused on competition and creativity, which we think open-source is key to, and so that’s what I would hope we see in this administration—not just leaning on the biggest companies and not just supporting the biggest companies, but supporting startups, supporting researchers, supporting open-source. So we don’t know yet, but those are all the things that we were pushing the last administration on, and we pushed governments around the world on, and as well, we would hope to see in the next four years in DC.
I would say that the idea that we need competition, we need creativity, we need open-source in AI really is a bipartisan issue, so that is one of the reasons I say nothing really does change in what we’re trying to push for.