Robust Open Online Safety Tools

What Robust Open Online Safety Tools does

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is a 501(c)(3) public charity founded in 2025 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., that develops and distributes open-source online safety infrastructure as a public good. The organization was incubated at Columbia University's Institute of Global Politics and launched at the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025 with approximately $28.5 million in initial philanthropic grants and in-kind contributions from Google, OpenAI, Discord, Roblox, Eric Schmidt, the Knight Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Project Liberty Institute, and other partners. ROOST is governed by an inaugural Board of Directors and a Technical Design Committee, with operational leadership under President Camille François, COO Anne Bertucio (ex-Google Open Source Programs Office), and CTO Vinay Rao (ex-Anthropic Head of Safeguards).

ROOST's product portfolio covers the full Detection–Investigation–Review–Enforcement (DIRE) safety lifecycle through three integrated components: Osprey, a customizable high-performance rules engine written in an SML (SQL-inspired) query language that processes 45–50 million events per day in production at Bluesky and Discord, supporting 100,000+ daily enforcement actions and horizontal scalability via Apache Kafka; Coop, a flexible open-source review console with reviewer wellness features (grayscale, sliding blur, muted video), automated enforcement workflows, hash matching via Meta's HMA, and built-in NCMEC-compliant CSAM reporting, with pre-built integrations to Google Content Safety API and OpenAI Moderation API; and the ROOST Model Community, a curated detection library distributing open-weight safety models including gpt-oss-safeguard (120B and 20B parameter variants jointly released with OpenAI under Apache 2 license with a Bring-Your-Own-Policy design), Roblox's 94-million-parameter voice safety classifier, and Zentropi's CoPE-B-A4B. All tools are distributed under Apache 2 license via GitHub (roostorg), Hugging Face, and Docker Hub as self-hosted Docker Compose deployments with no mandatory cloud dependencies.

ROOST operates a community-led, product-led growth (PLG) go-to-market motion with zero commercial revenue. The organization is funded entirely through philanthropic grants and in-kind contributions from a multistakeholder coalition spanning Big Tech platforms, philanthropic foundations, civil society organizations, and academic institutions. Distribution relies on GitHub repositories, a Discord community server with bi-weekly Osprey Working Group meetings, conference participation (FOSDEM, TrustCon, AtmosphereConf, UN Open Source Week), hackathons co-hosted with OpenAI and Hugging Face, and earned media. Customer segments span online platforms (Bluesky, Discord, Matrix), enterprise productivity (Notion), trust and safety teams across the industry, AI developers and researchers, and government and nonprofit organizations working on child safety and counter-extremism. Named production deployments include Bluesky (45M+ events/day on Osprey), Discord (Osprey donor and re-integrator), Matrix (active Osprey user), and Notion (early Coop predecessor adopter).

Name

Robust Open Online Safety Tools

Legal name

Robust Open Online Safety Tools Inc.

Website

https://roost.tools

Company type

Private

Founded year

2025

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

ROOST is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and distributes free, Apache 2-licensed open-source trust and safety tools (Osprey rules engine, Coop review center, and a curated safety model community) for online platforms, trust and safety teams, and government child safety organizations.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Washington

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Others

Revenue model

1. Philanthropic Grants and Donations: As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity, ROOST is funded through philanthropic grants and donations from founding partners and supporters including Google, OpenAI, Discord, Roblox, Eric Schmidt, Knight Foundation, AI Collaborative, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Project Liberty Institute. Initial funding of approximately $28–28.5 million in grants and in-kind contributions was secured at launch.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels10 records

Core offering

ROOST builds and freely distributes open source online safety infrastructure as a public good, organized around the DIRE framework (Detection, Investigation, Review, Enforcement). Its primary products are Osprey, a high-performance real-time rules engine and investigation tool; Coop, an open source content review and moderation platform; gpt-oss-safeguard, an open-weight safety reasoning model released with OpenAI; and the ROOST Model Community, a library of open safety AI models. All tools are licensed under Apache 2 and distributed via GitHub and Hugging Face for self-hosted deployment by any organization, from indie platforms to large tech companies.

Product overview

ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) is a global independent nonprofit building open source online safety tools as a public good. The ROOST Safety Stack covers the full safety lifecycle through four interconnected products: (1) Osprey - the rules engine for investigation and real-time abuse detection and response; (2) Coop - the review console for human and automated content review with wellness-first design; (3) ROOST Model Community - the detection library providing access to open safety AI models including gpt-oss-safeguard; and (4) the ROOST Safety Stack integrating these components for end-to-end safety infrastructure. The stack addresses Detection (via Model Community), Investigation (via Osprey), Review (via Coop), and Enforcement functions, enabling organizations from indie platforms to tech giants to deploy comprehensive safety infrastructure.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Osprey: A customizable, high-performance rules engine built for the speed of modern social and gaming platforms. Osprey is an open-source investigation and incident response tool for real-time abuse detection and mitigation.
• Coop
• ROOST Model Community

Products and services

• Osprey Osprey is a customizable, high-performance open source rules engine and investigation tool for real-time event processing and behavioral analysis. It is written in SML (a SQL-inspired query language) and processes 45M+ events per day and 5,900+ events per second in production environments. It is used by Bluesky, Discord, and Matrix to detect and stop scaled abuse in real time, conduct investigations into emerging threats, and encode platform-specific anti-abuse rules without requiring engineering roundtrips.
• Coop Coop is an open source content review and moderation platform that provides a human-centered review console for triaging complex policy violations across text, multimedia, and user profiles. It includes queue orchestration, reviewer-wellness features (grayscale, muted video, sliding blur), automated and manual enforcement workflows, appeals handling, complete audit trails, HMA integration for CSAM/TVEC/NCII hash matching, and pre-built integrations with Google Content Safety API and OpenAI Moderation API. Built-in NCMEC-compliant CSAM reporting is included.
• gpt-oss-safeguard gpt-oss-safeguard is an open-weight reasoning model designed for safety classification of AI content, developed by OpenAI and released through ROOST under the Apache 2 license. Available in 120B and 20B parameter variants, it features a 'Bring Your Own Policy' (BYOP) design that allows organizations to configure their own content policies rather than adopting OpenAI's rules, and can explain its moderation decisions for transparency. Hosted on Hugging Face.
• ROOST Model Community The ROOST Model Community is a collaborative ecosystem that makes open, inspectable safety AI models accessible to all organizations through strategic partnerships with AI model creators. It distributes battle-tested models such as OpenAI's gpt-oss-safeguard and Zentropi's CoPE-B-A4B, providing a curated detection library that any organization can deploy regardless of size.

Quantifiable outcome

• Osprey processes over 45 million events per day and up to 5,900+ events per second at Bluesky, enabling 100,000+ daily enforcement actions.
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers4 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration8 records

AI capability9 records

Feature4 records

Partnerships

22 partnerships are on record, tiered model community partner, founding partner, launch partner and research partner.

• Zentropimodel community partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 29 October 2025Zentropi released their CoPE-B-A4B model through the ROOST Model Community. This open model joins gpt-oss-safeguard as part of the growing ecosystem of open safety models distributed through ROOST's partnerships with AI pioneers.
• Discordfounding partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Discord is a founding partner of ROOST and the original developer of Osprey, which was donated to ROOST. Discord's Chief Legal Officer Clint Smith serves as Board Chair. Discord contributed funding, technology, and employee expertise. Osprey was built internally by Discord to handle abuse at scale and is now open sourced through ROOST. Discord also plans to reintegrate the community-enhanced V1.0 back into their own platform.
• OpenAIfounding partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025OpenAI is a founding partner of ROOST. Jointly released gpt-oss-safeguard (120B and 20B open-weight reasoning safety models) through ROOST under Apache 2 license. OpenAI's Moderation API is integrated into Coop for free use. Ryan Beiermeister (VP Product Policy) and Sam Toizer (Safety Product Lead) are key representatives. OpenAI co-hosted the Open Safeguard Hackathon with ROOST and Hugging Face.
• Robloxfounding partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Roblox is a founding partner of ROOST. Naren Koneru (Engineering Lead, Safety at Roblox) co-chairs the Technical Design Committee. Roblox open-sourced its voice safety classifier model (94M parameters, processing up to 400,000 hours of active speech daily) and committed to releasing additional open-source safety AI models. Roblox joined a $27M+ industry nonprofit to support ROOST's mission.
• Mozillalaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Mozilla is a launch partner of ROOST. Provided a small seed grant for the initial Columbia University research that evolved into ROOST. Mark Surman (Mozilla President) serves on the ROOST Board of Directors. Mozilla's aspiration is for ROOST to become 'a Linux of safety' — the kind of public technology infrastructure the Mozilla, Linux, and Apache foundations developed in the previous era of the internet.
• Hugging Facelaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Hugging Face is a launch partner hosting the gpt-oss-safeguard model weights and serving as a platform for the ROOST Model Community. Yacine Jernite (Head of ML & Society at Hugging Face) co-authored the launch blog post and participated in the Open Safeguard Hackathon. Hugging Face shares ROOST's approach to openness, collaboration, and pluralism in AI development.
• Blueskylaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Bluesky is a launch partner and the first major production deployment of Osprey. Aaron Rodericks (Head of Trust and Safety) has provided public endorsements. Bluesky processes 45M+ events/day through Osprey. Jay Graber (Bluesky CEO) and team participated in ROOST's launch, highlighting how ROOST enables small players to provide better user safety and meet regulatory requirements.
• GitHublaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025GitHub is a launch partner of ROOST. Tom Thorley (Senior Director of Safety & Integrity at GitHub) serves on the Technical Design Committee. GitHub's open source expertise and community platform underpin ROOST's distribution model and development workflows.
• Microsoftlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Microsoft is a launch partner of ROOST. Natasha Crampton (Microsoft's responsible AI leadership) represents Microsoft in the partnership. Contributes to the multistakeholder coalition working on open source safety infrastructure.
• Matrixlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Matrix Foundation is a launch partner and active Osprey user. Jim Mackenzie (VP Trust & Safety, Matrix.org Foundation) serves on the Technical Design Committee. Matrix is integrating Osprey to augment their existing open source ecosystem with investigation and rules engine capabilities for their decentralized communication network.
• Cinderlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Cinder is a launch partner of ROOST. Glen Wise (Cinder Co-Founder, CEO) published a partnership announcement highlighting parallels with cybersecurity's ecosystem of vendors and open source products. Cinder plans to contribute to and utilize ROOST-managed open source components, viewing it as aligned with their mission to create a safer internet.
• Christchurch Call Foundationlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Christchurch Call Foundation is a launch partner focused on TVEC (Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content). Partnership aims to develop AI tools for smaller online service providers to build TVEC handling capacity, accelerating research into technical solutions to prevent and detect terrorist content online. Paul Ash (CEO) leads the partnership from the Christchurch Call side.
• Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)launch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025CDT is a launch partner of ROOST. Alexandra Reeve Givens (CDT CEO) and team authored an endorsement of ROOST's launch. CDT emphasizes that open source tools improve transparency of companies' trust and safety practices and advocates for multistakeholder engagement examining these tools and best practices for rights-respecting deployment.
• Common Crawllaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Common Crawl is a launch partner. CEO Rich Skrenta highlighted that ROOST puts powerful safety tools within reach of everyone, not just tech giants, aligning with Common Crawl's belief in breaking down barriers to innovation. Common Crawl needs access to safety tools to secure the full AI stack, particularly for removing CSAM from datasets.
• Wikimedia Foundationlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Wikimedia Foundation is a launch partner. Jan Eißfeldt and Jan Gerlach represent Wikimedia in the partnership. Wikimedia is committed to co-developing online safety tools with ROOST to ensure more people globally can access knowledge safely, aligned with Wikimedia's mission and open source ethos.
• UMass Amherst Rescue Lablaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025UMass Rescue Lab is a launch partner focused on child safety technology. Led by Brian Levine, the Lab has been the premier CS research group working to rescue children from internet-based victimization since 2008. The partnership aims to democratize software for child safety teams by developing and publishing free software incorporating recent advances like machine learning.
• AI & Society Institute (Paris)launch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025AI & Society Institute in Paris is a launch partner bringing critical perspectives on AI governance to ROOST. Constance de Leusse leads the institute's engagement. Ensures ROOST's work is grounded in both technical excellence and thoughtful consideration of AI's role in society.
• Zoomlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Zoom is a launch partner of ROOST, represented by Josh Parecki. Joins the growing coalition of organizations dedicated to building strong Trust & Safety teams and championing ROOST's open-source mission.
• Match Grouplaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Match Group is a launch partner of ROOST. Yoel Roth and Lucia Harris represent Match Group in the partnership. Match Group has demonstrated dedication to building strong Trust & Safety teams and is expanding the coalition of organizations supporting ROOST's mission.
• Hydrox AIlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Hydrox AI is a launch partner of ROOST, joining the multistakeholder coalition focused on open source safety infrastructure.
• Tech Coalitionlaunch partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025Tech Coalition is a launch partner contributing deep expertise in child safety to ROOST. Sean Litton (CEO), Lauren Tharp, and Kay Chau represent Tech Coalition. Through their Pathways program, Tech Coalition provides expert advice, resources, and capacity-building opportunities to help companies enhance child safety programs. Transitioned HMA (hasher-matcher-actioner) office hours to ROOST in June 2025.
• Mila (Quebec AI Institute)research partnerStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 February 2025ROOST and Mila partnered to advance open source AI guardrails, starting with youth safety. Young people increasingly turn to AI chatbots for companionship, but existing safety tools weren't designed with that context in mind. The partnership focuses on developing guardrails that address the specific risks faced by young people interacting with AI systems.

Scale indicators7 records

Recent moves8 records

Expansion highlights7 records

Market position

Competitive moat7 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/roostorg
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/roost-tools

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles14 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Robust Open Online Safety Tools