ROOST is a new non-profit organization that brings together the expertise, resources, and investments of major technology companies and philanthropies to build scalable, interoperable safety infrastructure suited for the AI era.

We are a small but mighty team dispersed and remote-first. Our founding partners include Eric Schmidt, Discord, OpenAI, Google, Roblox, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AI Collaborative, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Project Liberty Institute. ROOST also benefits from the support and expertise of a wide set of partners from the fields of AI, philanthropy, academia, open source, child safety, and countering violent extremism.

Many organizations – big and small – still lack access to basic safety resources, hindering innovation and putting users at risk.

ROOST develops, maintains, and distributes open source building blocks to safeguard global users and communities. Backed by dedicated technical teams and leading experts, ROOST meets organizations where they are and provides hands-on support at every stage of their safety journey.

Many companies struggle to meet basic child safety needs because existing tools are either expensive, gate-kept, challenging to implement, and/or only partial solutions. ROOST works to close that digital safety gap.

ROOST partners with leading developers to build a community of practice for foundation model-powered content safeguards. We identify and fill critical gaps in this space, for instance around specific training and evaluation datasets for content safety.

ROOST focuses on high quality, open versions of core tools that immediately add value and avoid unnecessary duplication, such as rules engines, case management systems, review consoles, wrappers that provide standardized data formats and a unified interface to different APIs, etc