Mozilla’s ‘Rewiring’ to AI – Saving the Web or Saving Itself?

Mozilla is “rewiring” itself to put AI at the centre of everything: what it builds, why it builds it, and how it makes money.

Going forward, every product in Mozilla’s portfolio, including Firefox, will need to “design their strategies” and “measure their success” by how much AI is added and, more worryingly for ‘public interest’ projects, how much cash its AI features generate.

Target: 20% yearly growth in non-search revenue – around $25 million a year.

Mozilla says this is necessary to save the web (and humanity) from big AI, and to give users more “agency” and “choice”.

But is this really about a moral crusade to wrestle control from billionaire tech owners on behalf of their users (as it frames it), or a simple, cynical survival plan to woo the exact same billionaire tech owners into giving it cash in exchange for integrations?

Goggles on, as it’s about to get snarky.

Mozilla AI Rewire Explainer

Name: Mozilla’s “Rewiring” Strategy.

Age: New, yet also two years too late.

Appearance: Mission statement/business pitch/survival plea.

Tl;dr? To “do for AI what they did for the web”. They nostalgia about it beating Internet Explorer to free us from the yoke of Yahoo! toolbars, virus scan pop-ups and wonky web standards? They’ve repackaged it as a crusade against “Big AI”.

Fighting talk – what’s the battle plan? For the next three years, every Mozilla product must add AI features with a view to generating money. Mozilla call it their “Double Bottom Line”, placing revenue on equal footing with their mission.

Which one matters most? Well, you can’t pay a CEO with “mission”.

But they’re the good guys. The plan is to create a “sovereign” open-source AI ecosystem. They want to raise a “rebel alliance” of smaller projects to help fight the Big AI Empire.

I don’t like sci-fi. It’s like Greenpeace announcing eco-friendly oil rigs.

I also don’t like strained analogies. Fine. Mozilla lacks compute and cash to build and train its own AI tech, so all of the local AI features it and its rebel alliance will offer use ‘open weight’ models, mainly those provided by Meta’s llama. These may be licensed openly (for now; Zuck can change it any time) but was purportedly trained on material of dubious origin.

Mozilla must really like AI. Actually, they blame Big AI for filling the web with “slop.” 

They want to stop the slop? No, their solution is to make slop buckets available (through their “First Choice” agentic stack) to let more people join in producing it. But since these will be Mozilla-branded slop buckets, I think that we’re supposed to punch the air and say ‘RIGHT ON!’.

My head hurts. I think confusion is the point. Mozilla takes pot shots at Big AI while striking deals with them to integrate their chatbots in its browser. They promise “sovereignty” in AI features but plans to build them using bricks stamped “Property of Meta”… I could go on.

You do. Fair.

At least choice is good. Mozilla name-checks “choice” a lot. But currently, the choice is which Big AI chatbot do you want in your sidebar, right-click context menus and search box? Do you want to browse the web normally or using the upcoming Firefox ‘AI Window’ mode?

AI Winblowz. A new prompt-based way to use Firefox coming in 2026 — a “window” where it describes the view to you instead of, y’know, letting you look out and see it. 2025, man.

Please say that will be optional… Mozilla say it won’t “force” anyone to use AI in Firefox or Thunderbird, and that “classic mode” will remain available for those who prefer it.

But? They also say they will work “just as much on AI as on the web”, and with AI features tied to revenue targets… Well, you won’t make millions by hiding new features away in a settings menu on the off-chance someone “opts-in”. Ergo: prepare for nags.

And if an AI feature is useful but doesn’t make money? It’s ‘cooked’, as Australians would say.

Do they also say Mozilla is cooked? Not yet. But between AI pivots, ad-tech ventures, layoffs and cuts to web advocacy, leadership restructures, expensive rebrands and that bumper CEO pay… This latest ‘rewiring’ feels more ‘save the company’ than ‘save the web’.

Do ask: “Remember when Mozilla stood for something more than revenue targets?”.

Don’t ask: “Did they consult an electrician on this ‘rewiring’ or just ChatGPT, cos…?”

This is part of our Explainer series, where we chat through the What and How of whatever is happening in the wider Linux scene to find out if it’s actually worth caring about.