Civil society · Field-building · Democratic Republic of Congo
AI Safety DRC is a civil-society initiative building AI safety and governance capacity in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the people, the networks, and the evidence that let the country engage frontier AI on its own terms.
30 September 2026: Anthropic's supported-countries list now includes the DRC. See the record.Why this work exists
The minerals inside the AI age - cobalt and tantalum in batteries, devices and data-center hardware - come in large part from the DRC. Yet until September 2026, the DRC was the only African UN member state absent from Anthropic's supported-countries list: the country feeding the compute, locked out of the models. The December 2025 U.S.-DRC Strategic Partnership on critical minerals made the imbalance a matter of policy. Access is now opening. The harder work begins: making access safe, useful and real on the ground.
The DRC has leapfrogged before. It skipped fixed-line banking and went straight to mobile money; it skipped grid power and went to solar-hybrid. Low AI usage today says nothing about appetite - it describes a missing channel. Once the channel opens, adoption follows, and so does risk. Safety capacity has to arrive with access, not after it.
In our testing, frontier models fail on safety-critical tasks in Swahili - a language much of the country works in. Performance in Lingala, Tshiluba and Kikongo is an open question no one is currently resourced to answer. Deployment into the DRC without local-language evaluation is deployment with the instruments off.
A living record
How the DRC went from excluded to listed, in three weeks. We maintain this timeline as a public reference - it is the record we wished existed.
3 September 2026
Congolese digital-rights nonprofit CENSWEB launches the #ClaudeForDRC campaign, asking Anthropic for a clear path to responsible Claude and API access for the DRC.
22 September 2026
The DRC's Ministry of Digital Economy announces that Claude and the Anthropic API are being made available in the country. Reported by We Are Tech Africa.
30 September 2026
Anthropic's supported-countries page now lists "Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC)" in both the Claude.ai and API sections. First verified 00:14 SAST, 30 September 2026 - eight days after the ministry's announcement.
This tracker is maintained by AI Safety DRC. Last verified: 30 September 2026. The ministry's 22 September announcement preceded the visible list update by eight days.
Our first project
"The DRC Frontier AI Access Gap: Exclusion, Leapfrogging, and the Widening AI Divide"
A documented, granular case of the DRC inside UNCTAD's named "AI Divide" framework - what exclusion looked like, why it happened, and what opening the channel must now deliver.
The verified country-list finding, a hypothesis audit of the usual explanations (FATF, OFAC, payment rails - none sufficient alone), and the minerals irony as the hook.
The Swahili tested-and-fails finding and the open Lingala, Tshiluba and Kikongo question - tying access directly to safety, not just commerce.
The DRC measured against Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon and Gabon, and a qualitative study of the Congolese practitioner population that originated this project.
Access to frontier models as an input to the next mobile-money-style leap - making the stakes AI-specific rather than a generic development narrative.
We are looking for a research partner who brings methodological infrastructure to the study. AI Safety DRC owns the access, the practitioner network, and the framing. If that division of labor fits your work, we want to talk.
What we do
AI Safety DRC works across four areas, anchored in civil-society capacity-building. Government advisory is the credible downstream outcome of that work, not the starting point.
01 - Primary
Growing the people, networks and institutions that can do AI safety work in and for the DRC.
02
Policy analysis grounded in the Congolese reality - evidence the government and partners can build on.
03
Tracking what frontier AI means for the DRC before it arrives, in the languages the country speaks.
04
Making the DRC's case to the labs, funders and institutions whose country lists decide who gets a seat.
The advisory relationship with government is earned through the work: capacity first, counsel after.
Who we are
Founder, AI Safety DRC
Builder and systems thinker. His work spans blockchain-based mineral supply-chain traceability across the DRC and the wider SADC region, fintech, and enterprise AI fluency training - the intersection where the minerals economy meets the models it powers.
Contact: tshibangu@aisafetydrc.com