Mozilla throws Thunderbolt at enterprise AI providers

Mozilla has declared war on OpenAI, Microsoft, and other firms flogging enterprise AI platforms with an open-source alternative it says provides data privacy guarantees proprietary products never could. 

Mozilla Foundation subsidiary MZLA, mostly known for maintaining the Thunderbird email client, on Thursday announced the launch of the Thunderbolt AI client, which can tie into German company deepset's Haystack platform for AI orchestration and infrastructure. According to MZLA, Thunderbolt is designed for businesses that want an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise, and all of the lock-in and data security concerns that come with using them.

"The problem we are solving today is one of sovereignty and control," MZLA CEO Ryan Sipes told The Register in an email conversation. "Do you really want to build your AI workflows on top of a proprietary service from OpenAI or Anthropic … not to mention having all your internal company data flowing through their systems?"

Enter Thunderbolt. According to the product announcement, Mozilla envisions Thunderbolt as "a sovereign AI client" that's open source, extensible, and can be used to access AI chatbots for things like research, data analysis, and all the other things you can do with enterprise AI tools. 

Thunderbolt can connect to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Agent Client Protocol (ACP) compatible agents, and also integrates with the Haystack AI platform from German firm deepset, which enterprises use to build AI agents, multimodal apps, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Haystack lets enterprises connect these apps to most of the major LLMs, and has tools for orchestration, testing, and various other nuts and bolts required to run AI tasks at production scale.

Thunderbolt itself lets users employ the AI model of their choice, and Sipes told us that it can be configured to run in environments as small as a single machine if sensitive data needs to be kept secure.

Thunderbolt is available on GitHub now for anyone that wants to bang around with it. For those that prefer a more guided approach, Sipes told us that signups are available for smaller teams and individuals looking for hosted Thunderbolt, which he said MZLA is working on right now. 

"With the release of the source code, we are encouraging these organizations to deploy Thunderbolt within their own infrastructure," Sipes explained. "We can help folks get it deployed and set up agents, but if they just want to use it internally without any relationship to us - that's great too." 

Viva la revolucAIón 

So why does the world need another enterprise AI platform, and why is Mozilla choosing now to enter what's quickly becoming a market crowded by massive, influential companies? Sipes told us that he sees the current era as analogous to the early days of the internet. 

"Think about Internet Explorer's 95% market share before Firefox came onto the market," the MZLA CEO explained. "We, collectively, beyond just Mozilla, have to create alternatives to Copilot and ChatGPT so that the future of AI isn't just us renting it from a few gigantic companies." Everyone should have an ownership stake in their own AI, and each person using it should get to control how they do so, he added.

It's that early Firefox-era gusto that Sipes seems to be attempting to impart into Thunderbolt. "When you rely on these big proprietary providers, you're just renting a critical part of your organization's operations," the Thunderbird/-bolt boss told us. "Whereas if you deploy Thunderbolt and use open source agents like what can be created via deepset's Haystack platform - you own your AI stack, end-to-end." 

Mozilla has taken a similar line outside Thunderbolt, recently adding AI Controls to Firefox with a single switch that blocks current and future generative AI features. Again, Mozilla frames it as a matter of user choice.

It's clear what Sipes, and by extension Mozilla, are trying to accomplish here: They want Thunderbolt to be … well … a thunderbolt that incites a larger change in the enterprise AI space.

"It can't just be Mozilla, but we are part of the rebel alliance we see forming, those trying to build alternatives," Sipes told us. "I don't want to use these big AI platforms, and I know there are many like me out there." ®