NEW YORK (May 12, 2026) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is pleased to announce 10 new grants from its AI for Individual Rights Fund. These gifts reflect the dual mission of the AI for Individual Rights program: to expose how authoritarian regimes weaponize AI while helping human rights defenders resist with open-source, sovereignty-boosting AI tools.
Grantees include researchers exposing AI-driven repression, activists harnessing automation to scale their campaigns, educators bringing personalized AI training to those who need it most, and developers making AI private and accessible for activists worldwide. These grants empower the innovators ensuring that AI advances as a force for freedom, not repression.
HRF’s latest round of AI grantees include:
The Ark
In East Africa, many are locked out of AI tools that require credit cards, Western bank accounts, or costly subscriptions. Noelyne Sumba, a director of the Bitcoin wallet service Machankura Kenya, saw this firsthand and launched The Ark, an AI assistant where users can pay per AI-related task or per day with bitcoin over the Lightning Network. This allows for fast, permissionless, and low-cost payments, regardless of jurisdiction. Instead of expensive subscriptions, users can pay only for queries they need, ensuring affordable access to AI for writing, translation, coding, and more. This grant will support technical development, outreach, translation services, and free tier expansion for students and educators.
The Open Anonymity Project
Today, using powerful, personalized AI often means handing over sensitive data to centralized providers. The Open Anonymity Project is a research and engineering effort building privacy-focused AI. They have created the unlinkable inference technique for users to send anonymous questions to closed AI models like ChatGPT or Claude, which acts like a virtual private network (VPN) for AI inference. The group is now bringing privacy protection to personalized AI agents. This means an agent would be able to learn from a user’s sensitive information without handing all of it over to tech companies that could ultimately be compelled to share such data with authoritarian regimes. With this grant, human rights defenders can scale their impact using powerful AI tools without totally sacrificing privacy.
0xSero
Running large language models (LLMs) locally allows private, offline AI interactions. But devices like laptops and phones lack the power and infrastructure to run top models themselves. Open-source developer 0xSero works to make the most powerful open models capable of running on small devices. He researches and develops compression methods that identify and preserve the most important parts of a model to allow it to run with a fraction of the usual required resources. He also works to improve the applications needed to run these models locally. HRF’s grant will fund the equipment, contributor support, and operational costs needed for 0xSero to make state-of-the-art models usable locally on everyday devices, advancing privacy-protecting AI for users who face regime surveillance.
Human Rights in China
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building one of the world’s most advanced AI-powered systems for surveillance and social control, with much of it hidden from public view. Human Rights in China (HRIC) is a nongovernmental organization that monitors and promotes human rights in China. It is pushing to expose state surveillance. Through research, reporting, and monthly briefings, HRIC will track the CCP’s evolving tactics of digital control and AI-driven repression to drive global accountability and help at-risk defenders adapt, evade, and resist. HRF’s grant will support this work, strengthening those on the frontlines of the fight for freedom.
Confidential Computing for Freedom Tech
Confidential computing is a technique that developers use to keep users’ data private, but it is still very difficult to deploy in practice. Confidential Computing for Freedom Tech is a new project that aims to simplify the process. The project will create educational resources and a software platform that helps automate confidential computing. As more developers adopt this powerful technique, they can build private AI tools, confidential agents, and other privacy-preserving technologies critical for human rights defenders. HRF’s grant will support the development of this critical infrastructure to help scale secure, privacy-first tools.
Maple AI
Most AI tools turn user data into a liability. They store, retain, and leave it vulnerable to misuse by authoritarian regimes. Maple AI flips that model. It’s an AI assistant offering end-to-end encrypted interactions through a simple interface. Users can prompt powerful open-weight models like Gemma and GPT-OSS without their data being stored or exposed. For those at risk of authoritarian surveillance, this means the ability to research, strategize, and communicate without fear. HRF’s grant will support Maple’s efforts to improve reasoning, coding, and tool-building capabilities, advance document generation, and expand outreach to human rights defenders.
Freedom Skills
AI agents could become powerful allies for dissidents, but they are not always equipped to operate beyond the reach of surveillance, censorship, and financial control. Software developer Breno Brito is building and maintaining Freedom Skills, a GitHub repository that gives AI agents these capabilities. It contains validated, high-quality “skills,” or pre-written code, that instructs agents to work with privacy-preserving and sovereignty-granting technologies (like Bitcoin for uncensorable payments and Nostr for censorship-resistant communication). Brito will also use a vouching mechanism to enable trusted skill discovery. HRF’s support will expand this repository so dissidents empowered with these agents can easily coordinate, transact, and operate without relying on centralized services.
Enclave
An estimated one million political prisoners worldwide rely on civil society advocates to help secure their release. The work to achieve their release is slow, complex, and highly sensitive. The World Liberty Congress, a pro-democracy organization, is building Enclave.free to accelerate this process and make it safer. It lets advocates securely upload case files, generate rapid AI-driven analysis, and get instant answers to key questions, all within secure enclaves (hardware environments that keep all interactions private). Originally imagined by Berta Valle, Nicaraguan human rights defender, and vibe coded at HRF’s first AI Hack for Freedom event, this grant will help complete the project’s development and drive adoption for faster casework turnaround, resulting in a scalable, privacy-first tool for human rights defenders.
Gen AI
Many living under authoritarian regimes lack access to education on using AI effectively, securely, and in the service of freedom. Autumn Domingo, co-founder of Generation Bitcoin, is expanding her work from Bitcoin education into AI training to address this. She is building Gen AI, a hands-on AI program for those living in authoritarian regimes with a focus on Gen Z and women. Participants will learn the risks of closed-source AI, build software by vibe coding, and securely deploy personal AI agents. The program will also connect them with employers and advocacy groups seeking AI talent. HRF’s grant will help ensure the youth living under repression can harness AI effectively to defend freedom.
China Dissent Monitor
China has one of the most heavily censored internet landscapes. Evidence of protests and dissent are rapidly wiped from the internet. Freedom House, a nonprofit monitoring global democracy, created China Dissent Monitor, a tool that deploys AI to detect and document protest activity before censors can take it down. The project scans social media platforms like Weibo and Douyin. It documents findings in a public, bilingual database, creating a permanent record of dissent that the regime cannot easily remove. China Dissent Monitor has already logged over 14,000 cases of dissent since data collection began in June 2022. HRF’s grant will support the development of this AI-powered tool and database to ensure that brave voices dissenting inside China are not buried by censorship but are preserved for the world to see.
HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program is the world’s first to support open-source AI tools in the hands of dissidents while exposing AI used by autocrats 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.
HRF is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law. Gifts can be made at HRF.org/AIFund, and proposals for support can be submitted to HRF.org/AIGrants.
