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San Francisco, CA, November 10th, 2026, Chainwire
Sentient Foundation, a nonprofit research organization developing open-source tools and infrastructure to keep advanced AI accessible, has appointed Julie Belião, former VP of Product at Mozilla.ai and a Google veteran, as its new VP of Product.
Belião will lead product development across Sentient's frontier research initiatives, with a particular focus on recursive self-improvement and model provenance. Her appointment comes as the foundation works to translate its open-source AI research into practical tools for developers and enterprises, enabling them to build AI systems capable of improving themselves while strengthening transparency and trust in AI models.
Sentient's open-source research has been adopted by thousands of developers worldwide, with more than 12,500 GitHub stars across projects spanning agentic AI, open search, and model verification. Its research initiatives include ROMA, a recursive open meta-agent framework; OpenDeepSearch; OML model fingerprinting; and EvoSkill. The foundation's work has also been cited by researchers at Google, Microsoft, Meta, and leading universities.
The appointment comes amid growing industry interest in recursive self-improvement, an area already being explored in production at Google DeepMind and one that has attracted more than $2 billion in venture funding over the past year. Meanwhile, model provenance remains an emerging field without an established verification standard, highlighting the need for independent approaches to AI transparency and trust.
Belião brings more than 15 years of experience across AI research, product development, and technology, including previous roles at Mozilla.ai, Defined.ai, Unbabel, and Google. As VP of Product at Mozilla.ai, she led open-source ecosystem strategy and community growth across a portfolio of 61 repositories, helping establish Mozilla as a recognized contributor to the agentic AI developer ecosystem.
Her background also includes a decade of work in multilingual AI, spanning speech synthesis, linguistic resources, and NLP data supporting Google Assistant, Translate, and YouTube. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Université Paris Nanterre, where her research examined the relationship between sentence structure and speech patterns in spontaneous conversation.
Her academic contributions include co-authoring Rhapsodie: a Prosodic-Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French (2014), a shared dataset for studying spoken language, and Towards Best Practices for Open Datasets for LLM Training (2025), a Mozilla–EleutherAI collaboration outlining recommendations for sourcing, documenting, and sharing open training data.
“The AI industry has become very good at building impressive technology. The harder question is how we turn that technology into something genuinely useful, trustworthy, and accessible. What excites me about Sentient is the opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges like recursive self-improvement and turn frontier research into practical tools that developers and organizations can actually build on,” said Julie Belião, VP of Product at Sentient Foundation.
“Julie brings a unique combination of experience across academia, major technology companies, and startups, along with a proven ability to build products from the ground up. As Sentient focuses on translating frontier research into practical products, her expertise will be invaluable. We’re thrilled to welcome her to the team,” said Sachi Kamiya, Director of Growth and Venture at Sentient Foundation.
<h3 id="strong-about-the-sentient-foundation-strong">About the Sentient Foundation</h3>
The Sentient Foundation is a nonprofit research organization whose mission is to ensure that the most powerful AI systems remain open-source. The Foundation builds and ships open-source tools that close the gap between closed frontier labs and the rest of the AI ecosystem. Its research — including ROMA (recursive open meta-agents), OpenDeepSearch, OML model fingerprinting, and EvoSkill — has been adopted by thousands of developers and cited by researchers at Google, Microsoft, Meta, and leading universities. Sentient operates as a neutral party at the intersection of open-source AI and trust infrastructure, areas where no single company can credibly serve as both builder and auditor. For press enquiries, contact: marketing@sentient.foundation
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Contact
Director of marketing
Nicole Teo
Nicole@sentient.foundation

Former Mozilla AI VP and Google Veteran Julie Belião Joins Sentient Foundation as VP of Product

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