On June 24, the Sentient Foundation committed $42 million through its Open Source AGI Grant and Investment Program, with director Sachi Kamiya stating, "We believe AGI should be open source, owned and leveraged by humanity, not a handful of corporations." Sentient was founded in January 2024 by Sandeep Nailwal, Princeton professor Pramod Viswanath, and Himanshu Tyagi of the Indian Institute of Science; its research arm, Sentient Labs, raised an $85 million seed round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures. The grant program funds outside builders in two tracks: non-dilutive grants and startup investment. Kamiya wrote that "open source counterparts are now only 3-6 months behind" proprietary models, and her ambition is "to become the Linux Foundation of AI." Ben Goertzel, founder of SingularityNET, argued on the On The Margin podcast that "the core AGI code doing the thinking should be free and open source," warning against "an AGI arms race where just a few big countries are the only ones who have AGI." He noted that open code does not equal open access if running the model requires a hyperscale server farm. Kamiya added that "blockchain is the transaction layer for AI agents."