The ASF Responsible AI Initiative (with Jeff Genender & Andrew Musselman)

“Responsible” means aligning the Foundation-wide use of AI with the ASF’s greater mission of providing software for the public good. That’s our raison d’être.

Prefer video? That’s here: https://youtu.be/DgQtZzeHX2w

The Responsible AI (RAI) Initiative is one of the newest efforts at the Apache Software Foundation. In this PlusOne conversation, recorded at Community Over Code in Glasgow, Rich Bowen sits down with Jeff Genender and Andrew Musselman to talk about why the Foundation launched RAI, what “responsible” actually means in practice, and how the Initiative is helping Apache projects use AI well — without getting in their way.

We cover the copyright and licensing questions behind AI contributions, why every contribution still has to clear the same human-review bar it always has, the security-scanning work that protects projects from a rising flood of automated PRs, and the ASF’s own LLM gateway with self-hosted models. We also get into the Foundation’s philosophy of best practices over rules, the sponsors backing the effort (a \$1.5M donation from Anthropic and continued support from Alpha-Omega), and the longer-term dream of an open-weight model under the Apache umbrella.

Learn more and get involved:
https://rai.apache.org/
https://llm.apache.org/
Mailing list: general@rai.apache.org