Paris, France — Several major tech players from business, academia and civil society said Monday they were launching a foundation to provide safety tools for artificial intelligence (AI), on the sidelines of a Paris summit on the technology.

The Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative will build "scalable, interoperable safety infrastructure suited for the AI era", the effort backed by sector heavyweight OpenAI, former Google boss Eric Schmidt and vast gaming platform Roblox said in a statement.

ROOST would "address an important gap in digital safety -- especially online child safety -- by providing free, open-source safety tools to public and private organisations of all sizes across the globe," it added.

Politicians and tech industry leaders from around the world are meeting in Paris on Monday and Tuesday to discuss how best to manage the emergence of AI.

Open source development -- which entails software creators sharing the inner workings of their systems freely with others for collaboration -- is one proposed avenue for increasing trust in the new technology.

ROOST's contribution will include "free, open-source, and easy-to-use tools to detect, review, and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM)," the statement read.

The foundation, based at Columbia University in New York, will also use AI-powered large language models (LLMs) "to power safety infrastructure", it said.

ROOST said it had raised $27 million of financing that would cover "its first four years of operations", with donors including "a range of philanthropies and top technology companies".