Open Future Annual Report 2025
Open Future’s Annual Report 2025 covers our activities from January 1 to December 31, 2025, our fifth full year of operation. We present this report as part of our commitment to openness and transparency.
The report provides a detailed overview of our organizational strategy, including our core objectives and achievements in each area, as well as how we have developed and refined our approach.
A major highlight of our work in 2025 was the publication of a white paper on Public AI, developed together with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, which makes the case for treating AI as public digital infrastructure. This argument gained traction across EU institutions and shaped European policy debates on public investment in AI. Alongside this, we began building a coalition of European open source AI developers and conducted exploratory work on a European Books Data Commons with major European libraries.
Our most popular publication of the year was the white paper Beyond AI and Copyright, which built a new framing for thinking about AI in the information ecosystem. It moved the discussion beyond traditional debates about rights and compensation toward the sustainability of original content production. This served as the foundation for an updated line of work for our organization.
Our work on copyright infrastructure also moved from design to implementation. The CommonsDB project launched the CommonsDB Explorer, a tool that allows users to retrieve rights information for digital works based on content fingerprinting. By early 2026, the system had ingested over 700,000 rights declarations from data partners. In parallel, we deepened our engagement with the IETF standardization process for machine-readable AI preferences, with our Policy Director, Paul Keller, appointed as an editor of the working group draft. This ensured EU civil society has a voice in a process otherwise dominated by large technology and publishing interests.
Our work on Digital Commons and Public Digital Infrastructure placed us at the center of Europe’s digital sovereignty debate. As policy lead for the NGI Commons consortium, we published A Strategic Agenda for Digital Commons, the first concrete roadmap for EU investment in digital commons as foundational public infrastructure, and co-organized the Digital Commons Policy Summit in Brussels.
Finally, we secured funding from Collaborative AI for a new line of work, Steering AI Investment, which examines how public investment, private capital, and industrial lobbying shape AI development in Europe. This represents a strategic expansion of our advocacy capacity as we enter our sixth year of operation.
