We are pleased to share progress with the Responsible AI Initiative (RAI). Following its launch in April 2026, the RAI community developed its charter, which Vice President Jeff Genender presented in the August board report:
“The ASF Responsible AI Initiative is a program to support the open source technologies that underpin modern artificial intelligence, and help Apache communities adopt AI in a way that is open, transparent, and aligned with the ASF’s values. The initiative is grounded in the ASF’s guidelines for the responsible use of AI — human oversight, licensing integrity, security, and documentation — core principles rooted in the Foundation’s longstanding philosophy of community over code.”
The RAI is advancing its charter to support the development of trusted ASF open source infrastructure powering today’s AI ecosystem through three key areas: access to AI models and tooling, project-level ecosystem support, and community engagement and outreach.
Access to AI models and tooling
ASF projects and their communities benefit through in-kind donations that include access to an array of AI models, platforms, and tools.
Through RAI, members of the ASF Tooling Initiative, Security, and Infrastructure teams maximize access to advanced frontier models under Anthropic’s Project Glasswing program. This enabled full security scans to be completed across 75 Project Management Committees (PMCs) and 230 repositories in three days. Details on their collaboration and results are available in the “Security scanning at Foundation scale” blog post.
Project-level ecosystem support
RAI is producing recommendations and guidelines to support ASF projects that are developing software assisted by AI technologies, as well as for the governance and use of donated funds, compute time, and inference tokens. The following groups support the RAI charter.
- The ASF Tooling Initiative whose tools and services include:
- Apache Magpie, an agent-assisted platform infrastructure for open source repository maintainership.
- Apache Sourcelume, a project providing open source instrumentation for AI training data provenance.
Community engagement and outreach
RAI will be presenting at Community Over Code Glasgow in two capacities:
I. The RAI Hackathon will feature LLMAO — LLMs for Apache.Org — a Foundation-wide benefit for ASF Committers, projects, and their communities to reach sanctioned inference and related AI capabilities without requiring every PMC to hold its own provider key. “The goal is one governed, unified access point for attribution, budgets, and policy for work in an AI-capable ASF,” explained Genender.
ASF Committers are invited to sign up for access to LLMAO by completing the Quick Start guide.
II. The Responsible AI Roundtable will feature RAI and Tooling team members, along with experts from industry and academia:
- David Fisher – Vice President, ASF Tooling Initiative
- Jeff Genender – Vice President, ASF Responsible AI Initiative
- Holden Karau – Member, Apache Spark PMC
- Andrew Musselman – AI Platform Engineer, ASF Tooling
- Jarek Potiuk – Vice President, Apache Magpie
- Tim Storer – Professor, University of Glasgow School of Computing Science
Reflecting on the critical role of open source in advancing Responsible AI for the public good, participants will explore AI-accelerated issues faced by open source maintainers today that include:
- Attracting new committers tempted by the low-hanging fruit of automated development.
- Promoting meritocracy through “The Apache Way” of community-led contributions.
- Revitalizing seasoned committers previously daunted by large refactoring needed to upgrade legacy systems.
- Navigating the asymmetrical “arms race” of automated vulnerability reports and deluges of poor-quality data.
- Facing the “tragedy of the commons”,i.e. will AI make us better/faster/stronger or will it destroy the lifeblood of open source innovation?
Event attendees can ask questions and share their perspectives.
Community Over Code will be held October 11-14, 2026 at the Hilton Glasgow, in Glasgow, Scotland. RAI will be presenting on October 12.
Resources
- Learn more about the Responsible AI Initiative
