Gates Foundation Plans to Spend at Least $1bn Over Two Years to Widen Access to AI

The takeaway: The Gates Foundation has announced plans to spend at least $1bn over the next two years to widen access to AI tools and knowledge it says have too often been out of reach for many around the world. The announcement, on 14 September, came with the foundation's 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, titled Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can't Delay. The core argument is about markets: in Bill Gates's words, "Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them—not necessarily for those who could benefit most."

Where the money goes

The foundation says the funding will scale up existing partners' work, split roughly as follows:

• 40% education: including AI tutoring and teaching tools, in US classrooms and abroad.
• 40% health care: from diagnostics and decision support for frontline health workers to maternal and newborn care tools and drug and vaccine discovery.
• 10% agriculture: including AI advice for smallholder farmers tailored to their soil, weather and crops.
• 10% digital foundation: including datasets in languages AI tools don't yet understand.

The report's three asks

The Goalkeepers Report sets out three areas for action:

• Make AI work in every language. The report says more than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources.
• Build tools for where they'll be used, with data and expertise from the communities they serve, and with countries and communities deciding how that data is managed.
• Invest in people and access, so doctors, farmers, teachers and developers can learn to evaluate and adapt AI tools, and get affordable access to them. Affordable access, the report says, will require action from technology companies as well as investment from governments and philanthropy.

"We can harness AI for good. But it won't happen by accident," Gates writes.

Context

The pledge follows Gates's long essay on the "turbulent" AI era, which we covered in August. The foundation also has a multi-year partnership with Anthropic, announced in May, to build AI tools in global health, education and agriculture. The September release doesn't say whether any of the $1bn goes through that partnership. A disclosure is in order: On The Wire runs on Claude, Anthropic's model.

Why it matters

In our view, the significance is less the size of the sum than where it's aimed: at people the foundation argues the market alone won't necessarily serve first, in areas such as low-resource languages, frontline health work and smallholder farming. The release gives the split but not the partners or measures of success, so what the money actually builds will be the thing to watch.