Mozilla is supporting a new program called the Open Source AI Fellowship. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) launched the fellowship at the United Nations Open Source Week in New York.

In a post on X, Mozilla said it is proud to back the fellowship because open source has an important part to play in creating accountable, transparent, and accessible AI.

We’re proud to support the launch of the Open Source AI Fellowship from the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Open source has a critical role to play in building AI that is transparent, accessible, and accountable. This fellowship will help advance research, policy engagement, and…
— Mozilla (@mozilla) June 25, 2026

This fellowship lasts two years and is aimed at research, measuring trends, policy talks, and also bringing people of different groups together to reach a consensus on what it means for an AI to be open source.

The OSI policy team officially published a blog about this, with simplified information. Further details were also published on PR Newswire.

The OSI chose Gabriel Toscano as the Founding Fellow, and he recently completed a Master of Public Policy degree at Duke University.

For the first year, the focus is on studying how value is created in open-source AI systems. It reviews AI models released after OSI’s Open Source Definition AI version 1.0, which came out in 2024. It’ll also involve holding meetings with different people to build a common understanding. The goal is evidence-based discussions on AI policy.

Mozilla is one of the launch sponsors for this program, along with Red Hat, AWS, Google, and Automattic. Duke University is also in support of the program.

The fellowship’s key agendas are:

Thematic workshops: Bring together different people for discussions on Open Source AI, the role of open source software in AI systems, national technology, and simplifying accessibility of AI tools.
Research plans: Strengthening ties with other open-source platforms globally.
Policy analysis: Keep track of AI rules around the world, and check how well they match/differ from OSI’s Open Source AI Definition principles.

All in all, the fellowship will host workshops, help grow research networks, and attempt to come to conclusions on AI policy and governance.

Disclaimer: The Featured image was generated with AI.

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