Turing Award winner Yann LeCun joins as Chief Science Advisor to the AI Alliance and Project Tapestry, a new open-source platform designed to enable globally federated development of frontier open models while preserving sovereignty, local control, and long-term independence.
New York, NY — Today the AI Alliance, a non-profit AI research and open-source technology coalition with more than 200 member organizations, launched Project Tapestry to empower open and sovereign AI development globally. Project Tapestry will build a new open-source platform to enable distributed, globally federated training of frontier open models.
With Project Tapestry, the AI Alliance aims to create a new path for advanced AI development, one in which institutions, industries, and nations can join together to contribute to build more capable open base models, while retaining control of their data and the ability to build on the base to produce sovereign derivative models aligned to their own priorities, industries, culture, laws, and values.
Alongside Project Tapestry, the AI Alliance announced that Yann LeCun, Turing Award laureate, Chairman of AMI Labs, and one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence, will join as Chief Science Advisor to the AI Alliance. In that role, LeCun will help guide the scientific direction of the AI Alliance focusing on Project Tapestry as it advances from initial architecture into technical implementation and global collaboration.
“As AI is fast becoming part of the common infrastructure, there is a need for foundation models to be open so as to enable sovereignty and cultural diversity. As a key component of our information and knowledge infrastructure, AI should not be controlled by a handful of private entities through proprietary products. Some of the most important advances in science and technology have come from open science, open-source software, and open technology platforms at a broad scale. Project Tapestry is an ambitious effort to bring that model to AI — to create the conditions for open, distributed progress on systems of real capability.” – Dr. Yann LeCun, Chairman of AMI Labs, Professor at NYU, and Chief Science Advisor to the AI Alliance
Frontier Open Models without Centralizing Data and Compute
Today, the development of the most capable AI models is increasingly concentrated within a small number of companies and regions. Open-weight models have expanded access, but core decisions about training data, model objectives, architecture, and evaluation typically remain concentrated within the institutions that originate them. At the same time, many sovereign AI model efforts face steep barriers in compute, funding, data access, and specialized talent.
Project Tapestry offers a more powerful alternative: a collaborative approach to AI model development in which participants can help build a shared open foundation without surrendering their data, strategic autonomy, or downstream control. Its long-term vision is to develop an open global model — a shared open source base foundation model that can draw on broader pools of expertise, compute, and domain knowledge than any single organization can typically assemble alone — while enabling participants to create sovereign derivative models tailored to their own societal, industrial, scientific, or mission-specific needs, and aligned to their own governance frameworks, languages, values, and priorities.
“Until now, many sovereign and sector-specific AI efforts have faced steep barriers in compute, data access, funding, and specialized talent,” said Dr. Christopher Nguyen, Chief Architect of Project Tapestry, Board Member of the AI Alliance, and CEO & Co-Founder of Aitomatic. “Project Tapestry is designed to overcome that constraint through federated collaboration. The idea is simple but powerful: build a shared global base openly, then enable each participant to extend it in ways they fully own and control.”
From Launch to Global Technical Mobilization
Over time, the Alliance expects Project Tapestry to foster a vibrant and enduring ecosystem of collaborative, sovereignty-preserving model and application development. The AI Alliance’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization will serve as the community home for Project Tapestry. It will host and support the Tapestry platform and open source technical assets including models that the AI Alliance develops with the platform. Project Tapestry will be governed by a board of representatives from major contributing organizations globally.
The AI Alliance is convening a workshop in Paris on May 7-8, bringing together technical leaders from around the world to define Project Tapestry’s architecture, roadmap and model development priorities. Additional announcements are expected over the coming months.
“The AI Alliance was founded on the principle that open innovation can produce AI that is more capable, more accountable, and more broadly beneficial,” said Dr. Anthony Annunziata, Chairman of the AI Alliance and Director of AI Open Innovation at IBM. “Project Tapestry is an ambitious step toward making that principle real in infrastructure form: a path for the world to build the most advanced and capable AI collaboratively, but without giving up sovereignty.”
Learn more: https://events.iairi.org/tapestry