How Curos is funded
Curos is a non-profit, and it stays that way only if the money is boring, limited, and publicly reported. This page is our plain-language answer to a fair question: who pays for Ichnus, how much, and what do they get for it?
The short answer
Ichnus is free, funded by a mix of philanthropic grants, individual donations, and public research funding. We sell no ads, sell no data, and no funder gets influence over the product in exchange for money. The details are below, and we publish them every year.
The full audited financial statements are published annually in our transparency report, alongside this summary. The report for fiscal year 2025 (January–December) was published in March 2026.
Where the money came from, FY 2025
In 2025 we raised a total of $8,400,000 across four categories. No single funder contributed more than 30% of our total.
| Source | Amount | Share | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philanthropic foundation grants | $4,370,000 | 52% | Independent foundations aligned with a public-interest mission. No strategic or product strings attached. |
| Individual donations | $2,020,000 | 24% | From people who use Ichnus and believe in the mission. Small amounts, on average — no large personal donors. |
| Government research grants | $1,430,000 | 17% | Public research funding for interpretability and safety work. No commercial access in return. |
| Program services | $580,000 | 7% | Fee-based API access for non-profits and public-sector partners, priced at cost. |
What we would not take
Independence depends on what you refuse. Curos has a policy of declining money that comes with conditions we cannot meet:
- Advertising — we run no ads and sell none
- Selling or licensing user data — we do not
- Profit distribution to shareholders or founders — there are no shareholders
- Commercial customers paying for priority access or influence over the product
- Funding conditioned on product decisions or access to users
Where the money went, FY 2025
We spent our revenue on the work itself. The largest share by far is people — the researchers and engineers who build and test the models. Compute is the second-largest cost, because serving a free assistant to a lot of people is expensive.
| Spending | Share | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Research & engineering | 58% | Salaries for researchers, engineers, and the product team — the core of Curos. |
| Compute | 21% | Training runs, evaluations, and serving Ichnus to everyone who uses it. |
| Safety & evaluations | 10% | Red-teaming, evaluations, interpretability tooling, and external reviewers. |
| Governance & compliance | 4% | Board, oversight committees, auditing, and legal review. |
| Community & outreach | 4% | Community council, events, and translation of our research into plain language. |
| General & administrative | 3% | The ordinary costs of running a small organization. |
What "free" actually costs
Free is not the absence of cost; it is a decision about who pays. The compute and people behind Ichnus cost real money, and our revenue is a fraction of what for-profit labs spend. That is not a weakness we are hiding — it is the constraint that keeps us honest. It means we cannot buy our way out of difficult questions, and we do not pretend to compete on scale. We compete on being the AI that answers to its users.
Where we are headed
As of mid-2026 we are on pace to raise about $10.5M for the year, with individual donations growing as a share of the total. We publish the mid-year numbers in the summer transparency update, and the full year in the annual report each March. You can read the 2025 annual report summary in the newsroom.
Disclaimers
Curos is a concept project. There is no real organization, no real money, and no real annual report. These figures are illustrative numbers written to show what transparent, mission-driven funding could look like. If you are considering donating to AI safety, please give to a real organization.
See how this money is overseen →