NEW YORK (Nov. 9, 2026) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has announced this year’s second round of grants from HRF’s AI for Individual Rights Fund. The six grantees — representing developers, researchers, and civil society organizations at the intersection of AI and human rights — will receive support to advance AI tools for freedom worldwide.
Grantees include the team that is building an offline AI model to deliver uncensored information into North Korea and the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which hosted a hackathon to build tools that support democracy. Others focus on making private AI accessible to more people, including efforts to optimize open-weight models (AI systems that can be downloaded and run privately) to run on personal devices and simplify the process of deploying them locally.
HRF is pleased to announce the following grantees:
Skyhook Professor
In North Korea, more than 26 million people live in an information vacuum where accessing independent news, media, or ideas can lead to severe punishment by one of the world’s most repressive dictatorships. Skyhook Professor, developed by the Operator Foundation, is an AI model designed to bring otherwise censored information into North Korea. Built with accessibility, privacy, and user safety in mind, the technology enables people to explore information without relying on continuous internet connectivity. HRF’s grant will fund testing with the North Korean defector community, refining the product for utility and security, and improving Korean-language input.
Mia’s AI Lab
Running AI locally enables private interactions, away from AI companies and away from authoritarian regimes that could pressure those companies into handing over dissidents’ data. But the most powerful models require expensive hardware and technical expertise. Independent developer Mia’s AI Lab is working to make local AI more accessible and easier to use for as many people and organizations as possible. Mia takes open-weight models, modifies them, and optimizes them to run on a wider range of devices. Mia also creates “recipes,” step-by-step instructions that simplify running these models locally, currently focused on NVIDIA DGX Spark (a high-end computer). HRF’s grant will support Mia’s ongoing work while helping Mia expand these recipes to more affordable, widely available hardware like Macs and consumer GPUs. This work could help bring sovereign intelligence to more dissidents and small teams working to advance freedom.
Enclavia
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are secure areas within computer hardware that allow sensitive information to be processed in the cloud without exposing it to the cloud provider. But deploying them can take significant technical expertise. Enclavia is a tool that makes it easy to deploy applications inside TEEs so applications can run in the cloud without leaking data to cloud companies. So far, Enclavia has mostly focused on Bitcoin applications. With HRF’s support, Enclavia will extend these protections to AI, which could provide journalists and human rights defenders with a way to use AI with sensitive material without exposing it to the cloud provider.
DS4 (DwarfStar 4)
Many local AI applications try to support as many models as possible rather than focusing on making a few models run really well. Open-source software developer Salvatore Sanfilippo is designing DS4, an application that runs some of today’s most powerful open-weight models, including DeepSeek, locally. Users can download DS4 and then chat privately with compressed versions of these models that run on devices like a Mac Studio. HRF’s grant will fund the equipment needed to test and maintain DS4 across platforms and to keep it up to date with the latest model versions, helping more people and organizations harness the power of local AI. This especially matters to human rights defenders, who need powerful intelligence while keeping their AI interactions hidden from surveillance.
Important: DeepSeek was developed by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, whose models have been found to propel narratives and propaganda aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. Be cautious when using these models, including the compressed versions, as they may produce politically biased results.
llmfit
With the hundreds of local AI models now available, individuals often need to sift through technical jargon scattered across multiple sources to figure out which one will run best on their devices. That’s why open-source developer Alex Jones is building llmfit, a free, open-source tool that helps users find the right AI models for their computers. The tool can diagnose a computer’s hardware and recommend open-weight models based on their quality, speed, and compatibility. HRF’s support will fund hardware testing across a wider range of devices and the ongoing development and maintenance of llmfit, so users — including human rights defenders — can spend less time figuring out which model to use and more time putting private AI to work.
Hackathon against Putin’s party “United Russia”
In Russia, the Kremlin controls the flow of information, represses political opposition, and denies individuals a meaningful voice in their country’s future. This past July, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (a leading Russian opposition organization) hosted the Hackathon against Putin’s party “United Russia” aiming to overcome these challenges. Around 30 Russian technologists, activists, and international experts convened in Berlin to rapidly prototype freedom-enhancing tools using AI. With support from HRF, the event produced tools to expose election fraud, improve wartime safety, inform Russians about Kremlin corruption, and support the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s pro-democracy movement.
HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program is the world’s first to support dissidents using open-source, privacy-protecting AI tools while exposing how autocrats use AI as a tool of repression. Through grants, research, education, and events, HRF works to ensure that AI serves freedom and democracy instead of the dictators who seek to repress these ideals.
Learn more about HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program and the tools you can use today to safely and privately advance freedom work at HRF.org/AI.
