Launching ROOST: a letter of gratitude

Friends, fresh from the Paris AI Action Summit, what a joy to share that Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is finally launched! Backed by $28 million in initial funding and a historic coalition of industry, open source and civil society partners, ROOST hopefully represents a turning point in online safety.

ROOST is a new non-profit creating a shared commons of open source safety tooling for digital platforms and developers. At a time when AI is reshaping the online landscape, we work to ensure that organizations of all sizes can access essential safety infrastructure.

In a recent edition of Platformer, journalist Casey Newton called ROOST an “overdue idea” with the potential to “revolutionize trust and safety,” in the same way that open source tools made cybersecurity accessible and accelerated innovation in the 90s.

The vision for ROOST emerged from our diverse community of experts, whose in-depth research and safety experiences led us to a handful of guiding principles. For instance:

• Practical: "ROOST is here to develop and deliver tangible products, to produce and deploy software, and to keep real people safe,” explained Discord Chief Legal Officer Clint Smith. “In a world full of PDFs, we want to be shipping code into production."

• Accessible: “It takes hundreds of tools and millions of dollars to provide similar safety measures to established social media companies,” said the Bluesky team. “ROOST will enable small players to provide better user safety, meet regulatory requirements, and bring more competition to drive user choice."

• Open source: “ROOST has the potential to create the kind of public technology infrastructure the Mozilla, Linux, and Apache foundations developed in the previous era of the internet,” said Mozilla president Mark Surman.

This launch would not have been possible without Eli Sugarman and Juliet Shen's many talents and entrepreneurial tenacity. Going forward, Eli will serve as Vice-Chair of the ROOST board, and Juliet will take on the role of ROOST's first Head of Product. Chris DiBona was instrumental as a technical advisor as we launched the organization, and will be co-chairing the ROOST Technical Advisory Committee going forward. And I'm especially grateful to Yoel Roth, Dave Willner, John Redgrave, and Kat Duffy whose belief in this project and crucial guidance helped make it real.

We will be scaling up the ROOST team to deliver on our ambitious roadmap; please don’t hesitate to reach out on hello@roost.tools if you’re interested in joining the coop.

A heartfelt merci to all our launch partners; starting with Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics where we've been incubating this work (more about that here, and an immense thank you to my dear colleague Maria Ressa for her support throughout).

Read on to meet the ROOSTers across industry, philanthropy, the open source movement, research labs, and civil society.

ROOST Launch Reception (Feb. 9th 2025)

Each brings their own unique perspective and enthusiasm to this project, which I’m sharing excerpts of below.

First, founding partners, without whom this organization could not have hatched:

• Discord – Merci Clint Smith, Savannah Badalich, Kevin Hanaford, Hannah F., and their teams, who have been onboard early and loudly, sharing how their experience losing access to Smyte cemented their belief that a better, open system was possible. Discord wrote about the launch in their Safer Internet Day post, sharing: "ROOST is here to develop and deliver tangible products, to produce and deploy software, and to keep real people safe. In a world full of PDFs, we want to be shipping code into production."

• Google – Merci Laurie Richardson, Amanda Storey, Vincent Courson, Giacomo Gnecchi Ruscone, and the entire T&S org; and to our DeepMind colleagues who have been engaging with us around this work since the Columbia Convening on Safety and Openness – notably William Isaac and Will Hawkins. We appreciate their commitments to making child safety more accessible to smaller players, building on Google’s great existing work on this front (notably w. the Content Safety API!).

• OpenAI – Merci Ryan Beirmesiter, Jason Kwon, Nicole Roman, and the whole OpenAI safety and ENG teams. Ryan joined us onstage at the AI Action Summit for the launch, and wrote: “The need couldn’t be clearer, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Companies and nonprofits are often forced to reinvent the wheel when it comes to online safety, building tools that already exist and needlessly straining their technological and financial resources.”

• Roblox – Merci Naren Konerushared, Matt Kaufman and team. Naren shared a great post about “How becoming a founding partner of ROOST is key to [Roblox]’s safety approach.” I’m thrilled that Roblox will be co-chairing our technical advisory committee, and will continue open sourcing fundamental resources like its voice safety classifier model. More about Roblox’s commitments to ROOST in Fast Company and Bloomberg.

Tech companies are fundamental partners in this effort, but ROOST is not a corporate membership organization. It’s a non-profit, and we count among our founding partners a number of remarkable philanthropic leaders who are joining forces to address a market failure around safety technology:

• AI Collaborative – Merci Martin Tisné and team. As Martin noted: “Building AI in the public interest requires that we make essential safety tools accessible to all, not just to those with the most resources. ROOST represents a crucial step forward, providing open-source infrastructure that allows organizations of all sizes to protect their users and communities. This is exactly the kind of collaborative innovation we need to ensure AI development serves everyone.”

• John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – Merci Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, John Sands and team for their long-standing partnership and emphasis on how ROOST can translate safety insights into practical tools to be placed in the hands of builders. As Maribel emphasized, the “Knight Foundation has made deep investments in research that can both inform and increase our collective understanding of how companies manage content on their platforms. Roost will help that scholarship find real-world application in cultivating online spaces that better connect us to information, ideas and each other.”

• Patrick J. McGovern Foundation – Merci Vilas Dhar and Nick Cain. In Paris, Vilas artfully spoke to the ROOST mission: “The rapid evolution of AI technologies demands that we fundamentally rethink how we build and maintain digital safety infrastructure. ROOST represents a crucial shift in how we approach online safety–moving from siloed solutions to open, collaborative frameworks that can scale across the entire digital ecosystem."

• Project Liberty Institute – Merci Audrey Tang, Frank McCourt, Sheila Warren, Tomicah Tillemann, Jeb Bell, Lara Galinsky and team for their support. Sheila explained that: “Project Liberty Institute is committed to creating a decentralized digital ecosystem that both empowers and protects citizens. We are proud to be a founding partner of the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative. Ensuring developers, platform managers, and people have access to state-of-the-art trust and safety tools is essential to realizing the Institute's vision and mission.” We were honored to have Audrey Tang on the ground to launch ROOST at the Summit. She spoke beautifully about how ROOST can contribute to online pluralism, and sat with Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson to talk about ROOST accelerating innovation in safety. She of course concluded with a proper Trekkie call sign at the end 🖖

• Schmidt Entities – Merci Eric Schmidt, Ylli Bajraktari, Rama Elluru, Michael Lueptow, the Special Competitive Studies’ Project (SCSP), and Mark Greaves. Eric highlighted his conviction during our launch panel at the Summit: "Starting with a platform focused on child protection, ROOST's collaborative, open-source approach will foster innovation and make essential infrastructure more transparent, accessible, and inclusive.” We’re grateful for his generous and early support. We’re also grateful to Mark and his team who worked alongside us to transform our exploratory work at Columbia University into a new public interest technology non-profit organization in a few months.

Joining our founding partners is a remarkable set of launch partners. They are:

• Mozilla – Merci Mark Surman, Ayah Bdeir, Nabiha Syed, and the whole Mozilla team; who have been deeply involved with this work from its inception. Their ROOST launch blog post recaps the long road we’ve been on championing the open source approach to AI safety, from our joint statement at the UK Safety Summit in October 2023 to the Columbia Convening in December 2024. I'm humbled by Mozilla’s aspiration for ROOST to become "a Linux of safety"—and energized to see everyone already rolling up their sleeves to make it happen.

• The AI & Society Institute in Paris – Merci Constance de Leusse and team, who bring critical perspectives on AI governance, ensuring ROOST's work is grounded in both technical excellence and thoughtful consideration of AI's role in society.

• Bluesky – Merci Jay Graber, Aaron Rodericks, Emily Liu and team; who brought real perspective to how alternative online ecosystems bootstrap safety from scratch. Their head of T&S’s official statement on ROOST highlights the costs of such an endeavor: “It takes hundreds of tools and millions of dollars to provide similar safety measures to established social media companies. We are incredibly enthusiastic about this partnership with ROOST that will enable small players to provide better user safety, meet regulatory requirements, and as a result, bring more competition to drive user choice." We’re thrilled to join forces to build this much needed infrastructure.

• The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) – Merci Alex Givens and team, who have been amazing partners in civil society. Alex joined us in Paris for ROOST’s launch, saying: “ROOST is an important step toward ensuring all online services, regardless of size or business model, have access to essential trust and safety tools. By building on the expertise of large online players and other open source projects, ROOST is creating a repository of open source and interoperable tooling to help online communities of all sizes flourish and keep spammy, illegal, and harmful content off their sites. Multistakeholder engagement examining these tools and the best practices for their deployment will strengthen this effort and improve their utility. CDT looks forward to working with ROOST to meaningfully advance Trust & Safety tooling efforts in a participatory, rights-respecting way.”

• The Christchurch Call Foundation – Merci Paul Ash and team. We’re excited to collaborate to deliver on the Call’s original commitments to make open source tools more widely available. As Paul Ash highlighted, “partner[ing] with ROOST to develop more technical and information-based solutions to help the Christchurch Call Community [and] deliver the commitments in the Call . . . is a prime example of the power of our multi stakeholder approach.” More on our future work together is available here.

• Cinder – Merci Glen Wise, Brian Fishman and the talented and passionate ENG team at this leading safety vendor. In their post about their partnership with ROOST, Glen discusses the parallels with cybersecurity, and how the safety field can learn from it: “For years the cybersecurity market has demanded and fostered a complex, multi-layered ecosystem of vendors and open source products - and we think online safety requires a similar ecosystem. We look forward to contributing to and utilizing ROOST-managed open source components in the future - doing so serves Cinder customers and the vision that led us to found Cinder in the first place.”

• CommonCrawl – Merci Rich Skrenta, Greg Lindahl, Thom Vaughan, Pedro Ortiz and team. It’s critical that data providers and operators have access to the protections they need (for instance, removing child sexual abuse material) to secure the full AI stack. Common Crawl CEO Rich Skrenta says, "We've seen firsthand how challenging it can be for smaller organizations to build safe online spaces. That's why we're thrilled about ROOST - it's putting powerful safety tools within reach of everyone, not just tech giants. At Common Crawl, we've always believed in breaking down barriers to innovation, and ROOST is doing that for online safety."

• Matrix Foundation – Merci Matthew Hodgson, Jim Mackenzie and the Matrix team for bringing invaluable perspective on building safety into the very fabric of distributed systems. As the creators of an open network for secure, decentralized communication, their experience resonates deeply with ROOST's mission: "We have the problems that ROOST aims at. We live them every day. Working on safety is gruelling, expensive work, with obstacles at every step of the way, and a real human cost. ROOST can help to tear down those barriers, and we couldn't be more excited to partner with them. Technology is better when we share it, and when we build it together."

• HuggingFace – Merci Clem Delangue, Thomas Wolf, Irene Solaiman, Yacine Jernite, and team, who have been on the journey with us since the UK Safety Summit. Yacine’s ROOST blog post is worth reading in full for how it speaks about safety needs for the blooming AI developer ecosystem, and articulates why ROOST aims to reconcile safety and openness: “open and collaborative development of AI has distinct advantages over isolated and private development by single entities—it enables interoperability, plays an indispensable role in enabling research to support informed governance, and makes technology development overall more efficient and aligned with the needs of millions of diverse use cases and contexts.”

• Tech Coalition – Merci Sean Litton, Lauren Tharp, Kay Chau and team for contributing their deep expertise in child safety to ROOST. As Sean highlighted, "At the Tech Coalition, we believe that any reduction in barriers to the adoption of child safety tools is a win for children. That’s why we support ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) and its efforts to increase the uptake of safety solutions across the industry. We’re committed to strengthening the tech industry ecosystem in the fight against online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA). Through our Pathways program, we provide expert advice, resources, and capacity-building opportunities to help companies enhance their child safety programs. By making effective safety technologies more accessible, initiatives like ROOST can empower more companies to advance their trust and safety efforts."

• The University of Massachusetts Amherst's Rescue Lab – Merci Brian Levine and team, who bring their deep technical expertise to a critical challenge. This partnership will help democratize software for child safety teams and investigators by developing and publishing free tools that incorporate recent advances like machine learning. As they note, "The goal of the ROOST and Rescue Lab partnership is to collaborate to accelerate innovation in the realm of online safety, and to ensure that companies and organizations everywhere have access to the technologies needed to ensure basic safety protections in AI and online spaces, especially for child safety."

• Wikimedia – Merci Jan Eißfeldt, Jan Gerlach, Jimmy Wales, and the Wikimedia community. We’re excited to co-develop some of these tools together. Wikimedia’s statement on ROOST reads, “At the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, we are committed to protecting people who use our projects as readers and contributors. Our partnership with ROOST reaffirms this commitment, enabling our ability to co-develop online safety tools that can ensure that even more people globally can access knowledge safely. As an open source initiative like the Wikimedia projects, ROOST champions a community driven approach to tech development that is aligned with our mission; we are excited to collaborate together.”

• We’ve also been thrilled to welcome GitHub (merci Tom Thorley, Mike Linksvayer and team), Microsoft (merci Natasha Crampton and the whole MSFT team), Zoom (Merci, Josh Parecki and team!), MatchGroup (Yoel Roth, Lucia Harris and team), and HydroXAI amongst our launch partners. Each has demonstrated a clear dedication to building strong T&S teams and championing ROOST’s open-source mission, expanding our coalition of organizations who understand that safer AI development benefits everyone. Their engagement underscores the momentum and collective determination across the industry to ensure that safety keeps pace with new innovations. We were also truly fortunate to have Megan Smith join as a ROOST champion in Paris, bringing awesome support along with clutch advice for the path forward.

And last but certainly not least, un grand merci to President Macron and his team for making ROOST a key outcome of the AI Action Summit, and to the Summit Envoys Anne Bouverot, Martin Tisné (+ the fabulous duo of Alix Dunn and Claire-Marie Foulquier-Gazagnes), Guillaume Poupard, Henri Verdier and team for hosting us!

We’ve been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm from so many amazing indie developers, platform builders, and other small teams who have reached out since ROOST’s launch. The tide is rising – let’s get to work! ❣️